2006: Little Miss Sunshine

Little Miss Sunshine (2006, Dayton and Daris) 7/10


In the mid-Nineties, Hollywood appeared to be in a crisis of quality. The independents like the Weinstein’s Miramax had broken into the big leagues. Films such as Jane Campion’s The Piano, Billy Bob Thorton’s Sling Blade, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Anthony Mingella’s The English Patient began to seriously contend with the major studios for Oscar glory. Dustin Hoffman even briefly chimed that he would no longer work for the major studios.

But Hollywood struck back as Paramount (Vantage), Fox (Searchlight) and Warner Brothers (WiP) all established independent divisions: purchasing and producing “review-driven” films with budgets generally under $30 million dollars as Academy Award documentaries The March of the Penguins and An Inconveient Truth, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides and multiple Academy Award-nominated film Little Miss Sunshine.

Feted at the Sundance Festival, Little Miss Sunshine became an instant success with audiences and critics. Through their independent branch Searchlight, Fox purchased this $8 million dollar production for $10 million dollars: eventually earning almost ten times their intial investment as the film became a critical and commercial success. Co-helmed by former music video filmmakers Johnathon Dayton and Valerie Daris, Little Miss Sunshine became something of an anomaly in American independent cinema: blending the patented dysfunctionalities and cold intellectualism of films such as We Don’t Live Here Anymore and The Squid and the Whale, while adding a spoonful of sentimentality and ambrosia generally extractedfrom the genre’s blunt seriousness.

Little Miss Sunshine centers on a fractured New Mexico family’s journey to a child beauty pagent in California The family’s patriarch Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a motivational speaker obsessed with winning; his wife Sheryl (Toni Collette) is loyal and honest; Grandpa (Alan Arkin) abuses drugs, while Proust scholar Uncle Frank (Steve Carrell) abuses himself. The couple’s children teenager Dwayne (Paul Dano) and seven-year old Olive (Abigail Breslin) are polar opposites: one a brooding Nietzsche obsessive maintaining a vow of silence; the other a hyper and garralous child.

When it is revealed that Olive has qualified for “The Little Miss Sunshine” pagent in California, Richard gathers his family into their beat-up VW bus and shakily traverses west in hopes of fulfilling his desires to live glory through ordinary Olive’s unlikely nomination.. Along the way encounter tragedy, failure and disappointment, but learn the importance of togetherness, the didactic qualities of defencies and need for acceptance.

On a smaller level Dayton and Daris’ film is a study of the deconstruction of family values; a point emphasized on a smaller-scale by the lack of communication between the family members and elevated to a higher plateau at the pagent. With his open aggressiveness and hostile attitude, Kinnear’s Richard represents the hollowness in the contemporary American family structure: a figure who acts more like a drill sargeant than a responsbile paternal figure. While little Olive and the response to her at the pagent becomes a rallying point for this schismatic clan, their internal fractures are equated with a larger social fissure within western societies.

The performances particularly from Carrell, Breslin and Collette are particularly worth noting in their ability to keep Little Miss Sunshine scurrying along the desert highway, when the rickety direction- uncomfortably shifting gears from apertive highs to acidic lows- appears to stall this well-oiled machine. The adroitness of the film’s success is in its sugary safety-net: a grab-bag of archetypes, cliches and stereotypes of the iritable grandfather, the cute kid, the emotionally stunted father figure, the depressed intellectual and the misunderstood grunting teenager. Without these darker elements, Little Miss Sunshine would dither into further Splenda granulated sweetness.

Little Miss Sunshine is a good film with designs on becoming a great picture. It is an entertaining film filled with meaningful socio-cultural commentary and some efficient performances, but nothing more. Adhering to its framework, Little Miss Sunshine takes the inbred eccentricities and failed figures of American independent cinema and implements them for laughs, rather than a gravely staid reflection.

Given the film’s indictment of America’s open obsession with winning and unspoken fixation with child beauty pagents, the filmmakers’ emphasis on the irascible, melancholy nature of its indivdual characters could have proven disasterous. But despite the uneven nature of Little Miss Sunshine, Dayton and Daris discerningly address the moral implications of rigid concepts of beauty, failure and happiness on younger generations: producing an extremely uncomfortable insight into the world of child beauty pagens, which sadly disintegrates into an equally awkward finale involving Sister Sledge.

Despite her strong performance, the filmmakers’ general focus on the “cute kid” appeal of Abigail Breslin threatens the validity of her work. While her character is easily the film’s beacon of positivity, the filmmakers fail to stress the quotidan essence of Breslin’s Olive in comparison to the other pagent candidates. Instead by fetishing her in oversized prescription glasses and placing her in a fat suit, her character becomes overtly sympathetic to audiences: a jovial charity case, rather than a plain kid from the suburbs. Subsequently, the intended dark pithysatire is injected with saacharine hormones.

As, the major studios continue to invest in American “independent” cinema one may wonder if Little Miss Sunshine becomes less of an abbreration within the independent community and instead the precursor to a larger trend. With the sky-rocketing cost of producing summer blockbusters and the recent box-office success of films such as An Inconvienent Truth, Little Miss Sunshine and March of The Penguins, major studios may be willing to use their financial clout to market more cheaply-made documentary and character-driven films to increase their coffers and prestige such as 2005’s two dire major studio backed indies Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite.

The recent wave of low-budget horror films marketed at America’s teenagers has demonstrated that major studios have begun to develop a formula for maximizing their small investment in limited material.And by assauging the general public’s discomfort with the term “independent,” the major film studios could easily begin a return to producing more of the type of quirky, well-crafted films that the mid-Seventies summer blockbusters purged from America’s cineplexes.

But then again, will corporate shareholders really accept more Proustian references, suicidal gay scholars or heroin snorting geriatrics? Only if there is Little Miss Sunshine 2.

* Little Miss Sunshine is currently available through Fox Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque