Little Miss Sunshine
Directed by Richard Linklater
Warner Independent, 2006
By Doug Nayler
I get suspicious when I hear people touting a director’s skill based on the strength of a successful commercial. I can’t help it. I don’t like it. Say, “But it’s a good commercial!” to me all you like, it won’t do any good. All I hear are the words of Bill Hicks proclaiming that as soon as you do a commercial you and everything you say are suspect. I am, however, willing to admit that this cynicism is bred with no experience of the realities of surviving as a filmmaker. Perhaps my ethics would loosen if I were motivated by the imminent foreclosure of a mortgage. After all, there is something to be said for pragmatism. But for right now, hearing that the makers of Little Miss Sunshine also made some dumbshit ad for Volkswagen that had “Pink Moon” in it just makes me nervous.
Little Miss Sunshine features a family just soaked in disappointment. The father (Greg Kinnear) is an unsuccessful motivational speaker dragging his wife (Toni Collette) into bankruptcy. Their son (Paul Dano) has choked so bitterly on his self-involved teen angst he won’t even talk anymore. Not to mention the fact that her brother, the preeminent Proust scholar in the country (Steve Carell), has just failed in a suicide attempt. Oh, and his father (Alan Arkin) got kicked out of the home for snorting heroin. When their young daughter qualifies for the Little Miss Sunshine Beauty Pageant in California, the family decides to drive across the country to take her there. Zaniness ensues.
The first half runs almost like an ensemble version of About Schmidt. The family drives uselessly down highways dealing with a cruel, sadistic universe that deems them each useless in their individual way. Anything they do seems pathetic and absurd. By the end, however, there’s a shift into sentimental, life-affirming territory. “We may not have what we want, but we have each other” sort of a thing. It seems like there are two competing films wrestling for the fate of the Hoover family: it could just as easily end with a group hug or a mass suicide.
