Film
Little Miss Sunshine
- Director
- Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 102 mins
Clean-cut Richard Hoover (Greg Kinnear) aspires to become one of those scary, shiny-faced, ultra-confident American self-help gurus. There are two kinds of people in the world, he theorises: winners and losers. And he’s developed a nine-point ‘refuse to lose’ programme to turn the latter into the former. Unfortunately, Richard is himself something of a loser. Publishers seem reluctant to buy his motivational tome and, much to the annoyance of long-suffering spouse Sheryl (Toni Collette), who’s taken to feeding her spectacularly dysfunctional family on buckets of junk food, they’re rapidly running out of money. Inspired by her father’s philosophy, podgy, bespectacled, relentlessly sunny seven-year-old Olive (Abigail Breslin) dreams of becoming a pre-pubescent beauty queen. Her sullen teenage brother Dwayne (Paul Dano) radiates alienation and has retreated into a self-imposed vow of silence, communicating through furiously-scribbled notes (“I hate everyone!”). Crusty Grandpa (Alan Arkin) is a potty-mouthed hardcore pornography enthusiast who’s taken up snorting heroin on the grounds that his twilight years are the best time to develop a taste for hard drugs. And they’ve just been joined by Sheryl’s suicidal, homosexual, academic brother Frank (Steve Carell) – “the country’s pre-eminent Proustian scholar” – who recently lost his grant and the student he loved to an intellectual inferior. When Olive gets the opportunity to compete in a Californian beauty contest, everyone piles aboard the family’s battered VW van for a long and eventful journey from Albuquerque.
There’s nothing especially novel about exploring the messy reality beneath the façade of family normalcy, and subsequent plot developments owe more than a little to the travails of the more low-rent Griswolds in National Lampoon’s Vacation. But it’s easy to see why this was an Oscar-winning hit. Michael Arndt’s perfectly calibrated script achieves the rare trick of being smart, consistently funny and warm-hearted, without permitting its affection for these characters to descend into cheap sentiment. The casting is spot-on too, although nit-pickers might object that Toni Collette is rather under-used. Husband and wife directorial team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris have pulled the whole thing off in some style under difficult circumstances over five years, and there’s a terrific payoff for anyone who feels queasy about the sexualisation of Barbie-esque children in beauty pageants.
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