Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (2006)
The original script by Michael Arndt isn’t fully thought through and some of the characters are amusing ideas rather than credible people – but Arndt has an excellent ear for dialogue, Dayton and Faris (directing their first feature) shape the action confidently, and the actors are wonderful. Little Miss Sunshine is a refreshing take on the road film: the story is about getting seven-year-old Olive from the family home in New Mexico to the ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ beauty pageant in California; the conveyance is the family’s (according to Wikipedia) ‘Volkswagen T2 Microbus’, which has seen better days. Greg Kinnear is Olive’s father, Richard, a motivational speaker with a nine-step programme designed to create winners rather than losers. It’s made too obvious from the start that Richard is a loser but Kinnear’s skill and sympathy make the character more likeable than ridiculous and you root for him. Toni Collette is marvellously true as Richard’s wife Sheryl – the family’s (and the rest of the cast’s) anchor. This marriage is always believable: you realise that Richard has become more desperately pompous as his career becomes less successful. Steve Carell is Frank, Sheryl’s brother, who has come to stay with his sister’s family after a failed suicide attempt: the country’s leading Proust scholar, he’s fallen in love with one of his graduate students, only to see the (male) student start an affair with the number two Proust scholar. This thread of the story makes no sense: Proust is too big a name (a more obscure writer would have been funnier) and the idea that a career in Proustian studies could be wrecked in the way the film suggests is daft. But Carell is a wonderfully versatile physical comedian; he runs the gamut from tiny movements of his facial muscles, as he suffers in silent contempt to Richard blaring on, to an extravagantly funny upright sprint (that echoes Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate) into the climactic beauty pageant sequence.
As Olive, Abigail Breslin is genuinely eccentric and really likeable. Alan Arkin is her grandfather – a kind of senescent delinquent. As well as getting (and earning) a laugh with nearly every line, Arkin gets over a weariness in Grandpa’s bellicosity that turns the role into something much stronger than it might otherwise have been. Paul Dano is Olive’s unspeaking brother (he’s taken a vow of silence until he achieves his ambition of becoming a test pilot) – and does well in what’s perhaps the most difficult part. The Daytons (who are husband and wife) and Arndt develop situations that are funny and engaging but which you know, as you’re enjoying them, it’s going to be difficult to resolve in a satisfying way – either the film will just come to a stop or there’ll be an artificially engineered ‘conclusion’. The writer and directors opt for the latter: Olive’s eventual stage routine at the pageant, and the chaos that ensues, feel forced – at odds with and raising questions in your mind about what’s gone before. But the ensemble playing is just about perfect and the film builds up so much goodwill that it hardly matters that the end is disappointing: the journey has been more than enough.
20 September 2006
