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On
the Road, Again LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE: Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. Written by Michael Arndt. Cinematography, Tim Suhrstedt. Music, Mychael Danna, featuring music by DeVotchka. Starring Toni Collette, Greg Kinnear, Abigail Breslin, Steve Carell, Alan Arkin and Paul Dano. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2006. R. 99 minutes.
The directorial debut from husband and wife team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, Little Miss Sunshine is the small, independently-produced movie that could. Financed by producer Marc Turtletaub after being dropped by Focus Features, the film was snapped up in a record-making deal at the Sundance Film Festival. It's a funny backstory for a charming, well-paced and fantastically acted movie that celebrates, with dark humor, family drama and a helping of absurd spectacle, the character-making, eye-opening value of losing. Faris and Dayton have a long list of music videos and commercials in their directing history, but they offer a subdued, nostalgic visual feel in Little Miss Sunshine, rich with images of the open road, with the family's bright yellow VW bus rocketing precariously across state lines. The film's actors look and behave like real people: messy hair, ordinary clothes, deeply flawed personalities. Richard Hoover (Greg Kinnear), desperate to squeeze an income from his clichéd nine-step plan for success, rattles off platitudes and get-ahead rules, not realizing what his endless go-getterisms do to the dreams of his young daughter, Olive (Abigail Breslin). Olive's excited run at the Little Miss Sunshine pageant is what gets the whole family on the road from Albuquerque to California. The would-be beauty queen's coach is her drug-snorting, porn-loving, potty-mouthed grandfather (Alan Arkin), who lives with his son's family after being kicked out of a nursing home. Grandpa is arguably the toughest character to accept in this quirkfest of a family, though some might argue that honor falls to teenage Dwayne (Paul Dano), who hasn't spoken in nine months. His vow of silence has something to do with Nietzsche and something to do with his desire to go to the Air Force Academy and become a test pilot, which, considering the kid's self-decorated t-shirts, dyed black hair and rebellious attitude, seems a little odd. But Dano, with his pinched face, thin shoulders and jutting chin, makes a real person out of Dwayne, whose dreams run into a pretty serious roadblock. The family is rounded out by harried mom Sheryl (Toni Collette, bringing her usual spark to the movie's closest-to-ordinary character), who spends much of her time either arguing with Richard or imploring rest of the family to stop arguing, and her brother Frank (Steve Carell), a gay Proust scholar driven to attempted suicide by loss and failure. Carell brings unexpected weight to the role of Frank, his nuanced performance making the bitter, lovelorn man deeply sympathetic (and occasionally very funny). His expressionless façade cracks, bit by bit, under the all-too-human reality of disagreeing with Richard, explaining his suicide attempt to Olive and, in one of the film's best scenes, bonding with Dwayne. Little Miss Sunshine, at its heart, is a fairly predictable film: The family that road-trips together will endure endless obstacles while fighting, bonding and learning about themselves and life together. In this case, they'll also have their eyes opened to the absurdity of beauty pageants and the narrow-mindedness of the American obsession with winning — or, more specifically, being a winner, no matter what that means — at all costs. But as clear as these themes are, they're secondary to the movie's greater strength: the cast's ability to create endearing, broken, believable people out of characters whose idiosyncrasies threaten to overwhelm them. Little Miss Sunshine opens Friday, Aug. 25 at the Bijou.
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