Distributed by Fox Searchlight,
the same company that worked its box-office magic with the similarly idiosyncratic comedies Napoleon Dynamite, The Full Monty and Sideways, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ careening road movie
Little Miss Sunshine
arrives, pre-anointed, as this summer’s requisite indie darling and
counter-programming gem. Snapped up at the Sundance Film Festival,
where it screened to rapturous reception and sparked a bidding war, the
movie is
an achingly deliberately madcap family adventure that skates
by thinly on the collective charms of its ensemble cast. Richard
Hoover (Greg Kinnear) is a would-be motivational speaker on the verge
of an important book deal, whose thickly lacquered, bootstraps
positivism barely conceals a violent disdain for the world around him.
He and his wife, Sheryl (Toni Collette), have two kids — 7-year-old,
slightly plump Olive (Abigail Breslin), obsessed with beauty pageants,
and disaffected teen and armchair nihilist Dwayne (Paul Dano), who has
taken an oath of silence until he achieves his goal of entering the Air
Force Academy. Living with them is Richard’s irascible father (Alan
Arkin), a foul-mouthed heroin junkie who heartily advises Dwayne to
bang all the chicks that he can.
When we first meet the dysfunctional Hoover clan, Sheryl’s suicidal
brother Frank (Steve Carell), a gay Proust scholar despondent over a
recent breakup, has joined them as well, only further upping the
awkwardness quotient of dinner-table conversation. A call about the
titular California beauty pageant sends Olive into an ecstatic tizzy —
she’s a last-minute replacement — and so the Hoovers, unable to afford
airfare or leave Frank alone, all pile into an untrustworthy,
rusted-out VW Bus to head west. The bulk of the film then charts their
bickering misadventures on the road before arriving at the garish and
creepy but not too overplayed beauty pageant finale.
Penned by debut screenwriter Michael Arndt, the film is funny in
piecemeal fashion, charting various cathartic highs and crushing lows
enjoyed by its characters, but if only these bits felt more strongly
tethered to something emotionally substantive. Perhaps I’m a bit too
inured by hegemonic comedic formula, but Little Miss Sunshine’s
characters almost all feel like willfully colorful responses to the
sort of stale, cardboard characters we see in many broadly pitched,
mainstream comedies — atypical, therefore, but just as flatly
two-dimensional and in blind service to the contrivances of plot as
their less original contemporaries. Sheryl, for instance, has to go
from beleagueredly supportive to a harridan at a moment’s notice, all
in order to generate momentary drama, and Dwayne’s eventual breakdown
similarly leaves a sour taste of fleeting — and thus false — pathos.
The seams of this story all show.
Dayton and Faris — an experienced husband-and-wife team making the
leap from commercials and music videos to features with this, their
film debut — coax terrifically enthusiastic performances out of their
cast, and it’s here that Little Miss Sunshine most succeeds.
Arkin tears into his role with glee. Carell gets to showcase another
side of his talents. Dano is a gifted young actor with impeccable
instincts, and Breslin, meanwhile, is a smart choice upon which to hang
the film. In a story that’s rooted somewhat in the real world but
requires big gestures and acting out from a lot of its cast, she is the
underplayed nexus of what marginal, to-scale poignancy the movie does
achieve, for in her wide, blinking eyes and boldly indifferent Little
Miss Sunshine final performance one can clearly recall the tension of
adolescent realization at being judged, and how that judgment will
continue into perpetuity in adulthood.
Little Miss Sunshine isn’t for everyone — its R rating,
albeit a “light” one, assures us of that — but
one can appreciate, in
fits and starts, the chord that it strikes in highlighting familial
extremes. Ultimately the Hoover clan achieves that pinch of momentary
togetherness that assures us all these characters really love one
another and belong together, but it feels
synthetically attained in my
opinion.
(Fox Searchlight, R, 101 mins.) 
