Little Miss Sunshine

Little Miss Sunshine is a nearly-perfect movie. Funny, dramatic, heady, adventurous, and poignant, the whole experience is downright delightful. It’s the first movie I’ve watched this year that made me start thinking about possible Oscar nominations, which is always an exciting moment coming out of the more overtly box office-driven summer flicks.

The opening sequence introduces us to six characters whose relationships to each other are unknown, and we are immediately able to glimpse their cores; this musical number is stunningly economical and pushes the film into its first scene—mostly around the dinner table—which connects all of the characters while confirming and deepening our original impressions of them.

The procession of the narrative reminds me of Rob Gordon’s advice for a compilation tape in High Fidelity (the movie, not the book). ‘You gotta kick it off with a killer, to grab attention, then you gotta take it up a notch. But you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you cool it off a notch.’ As the movie settles into its main sequence of events, a road trip, it maintains the momentum afforded by its spectacular opening without peaking too soon. And when it’s time to reach the climax, we reach it in an unexpected and unforgettable way. I don’t want to spoil it, but I can tell you Rick James is involved.

Little Miss Sunshine’s greatest strength may be the actors’ abilities to be so sincere that they make us squirm. Though the movie is certainly an ensemble set-up, Steve Carell’s Frank is the central character. He mediates nearly every other relationship in the movie and seems to be something of a misery sponge, soaking up everyone else’s problems in a manner that allows them to grow and experience happinesses that seemed previously unattainable. He also wears mostly white, has scars on his wrists, and is able to penetrate others’ thoughts in a way that they themselves are often unable to do. ‘Christ figure,’ I believe, is the term.

Carell’s performance is refreshing. When I saw him in Bruce Almighty, I hoped he would be able to be that funny all the time, and he has proven he can be. But, until now, he has mostly hammed it up. He stole scenes from Jim Carrey in Bruce Almighty (and is now the focus of the franchise, with the upcoming Evan Almighty) and Will Ferrell in Anchorman, and now he is regularly seen on NBC’s The Office as Michael Scott, one of the most absurdly ridiculous TV characters ever. But what is refreshing about his performance here is his ability to blend into the fabric of the movie. Sure, Michael Scott (his Office character) comes out to play every now and again (listen for his banter about ‘a la mode’), but, for the most part, Carell graciously plays it straight, allowing himself to engage in the (mostly) more understated and ironic comedy of LMS.

But Carell does not carry the movie alone. Every major part is covered expertly. Greg Kinnear (why am I always surprised by him?) plays the loser-in-denial Richard, who, in lieu of being a winner himself, has decided to dedicate his life to making others feel like losers so that he can (fail to) build them into winners, so perfectly that much of his ill-timed and poorly-reasoned ‘advice’ received audible grunts or groans from the audience in the Princeton theater where we watched LMS. Toni Collette, as usual, nailed her part, Sheryl, a well-intentioned mother who could probably be much better if she didn’t spend all of her time fixing Richard’s screw-ups. And Alan Arkin as Grandpa is indulgently irreverent and irresponsible.

As the kids, Paul Dano and Abigail Breslin shine as Dwayne and Olive, respectively. Olive comes across as a mixture of sweet-and-innocent with overexposed-and-misdirected. Dano, who is mute for the first half of the film, pulls a wide range of expression from facial contortions, stares, and body language. In a stellar cast, Dano may very well outshine them all.

Each character is deeply flawed, and the behavior of the family throughout the movie ranges from ill-advised (driving a van without a clutch) to criminal (leaving a hospital with a dead body). But, somehow, we love them anyway. They engage us by showing us some of what is worst about ourselves but tempering it with well-timed comedy and a relentless drive towards redemption. And who couldn’t use a little redemption?