It’s sad, touching and comic -- Little Miss Sunshine
Little Miss Sunshine
Genre: Family road trip.
Directors: Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris
Cast: Greg Kinnear, Tony Collette, Steve Carell, Alan Arkin, Abigail Breslin, Paul Deno.
Storyline: The members of a dysfunctional family discover more about themselves and life en route to a children’s beauty pageant.
Bottomline: Refreshingly honest.
Crises bring out the best and the worst in families. Take a dysfunctional family and the degrees of individual quirkiness can either make or break a situation.
Olive (Abigail Breslin) is the irrepressibly chirpy seven -year-old daughter of Richard (Greg Kinnear), a failed, motivational speaker, and Sheryl (Toni Collette), a frazzled, caring mother. Sheryl wants her daughter to win the Little Miss Sunshine crown at the national finals of the pre-teen beauty pageant.
With her innocence and never-say-die attitude spurring them, the entire family, including her silent, stoic brother, Dwayne (Paul Deno), her uncle Frank (Steve Carell), a gay, suicidal and a Proust-scholar, and her drug-abusing grandpa (Alan Arkin) hops onto a Volkswagon bus to give it a shot.
From their hometown in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to their destination, California, nothing goes right for the members. The bus that breaks down and has to be push-started each time, becomes the symbol of the frustrating situations they face. Despite patience wearing thin, petty squabbling and glitches galore, they make it to the venue, just in time.
Screenwriter Michael Arndt creates situations that are sad, touching and comic all at the same time. Not rolling-in-the aisles funny, but drawing spontaneous laughs that sometimes leave a bittersweet aftertaste. You do find a little bit of yourself and your family in them.
Winners and losers
Going by Richard’s mechanically spewed definitions, who are the so-called winners and losers? The plastic, vacuous smiles of live Barbie doll contestants versus the family’s dorky display of genuine bonding makes you take a long hard look at what really constitutes success and winning. There are no solutions here, only the practical message that what cannot be cured must be endured, albeit as gracefully as possible and by staying together.
The performances are uniformly excellent. A refreshing honesty comes through in Carell’s self-confronting portrayal. Paul Deno has his big dramatic moment when he suddenly erupts on discovering that he is colour blind and can never be a fighter pilot. Abigail Breslin’s combination of vulnerability, smartness and transparent emoting assures her of a special place in a galaxy of child stars.
KLT
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