An Eccentric and Enjoyable Character Comedy
Little Miss Sunshine
Cast: Abigail Breslin, Steve Carell, Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette
Director: Jonathan Dayton
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Plot Summary A girl and her dysfunctional family make a road trip to California for her to perform in the Little Miss Sunshine contest.
A knowledgeable and interesting character study, this comedy/drama focuses on a family with eccentric (but not unbelievable) members, all brought together to bring Olive (Breslin) to California. She is the bright spark of the group, enthusiastic and generally upbeat with childlike innocence.
All the other members of the family are nursing psychological wounds. Frank (Carell) is a Proust scholar (the second best in the country) who has just recently attempted suicide. He moves in with his sister Sheryl (Collette), who is married to Richard (Kinnear), an excitable "motivation expert" hoping to sell his nine-step program to the masses. Rounding out the menagerie is Olive's older brother Dwayne, a Nietzsche devotee who has taken a vow of silence until he's joined the Air Force, and Grandpa (Alan Arkin), a drunk and a druggie who still has enough on the ball to teach Olive her dance number.
With all the personalities contained in a confined space — namely, an amusingly eccentric yellow Volkswagen bus — you can imagine sparks will fly. And they do, but in a realistic way. While the plot does loom large, and there are many funny situations for the characters to work through, the story is character-driven, not plot-driven. We get to know and care about these people, and hope that the contest is worth their efforts.
The contest itself is a good summing up of the entire story, where the family comes together at last. Appropriately creepy (at least to me), Olive stands out among the contestants as, well... normal. And her dance routine is not surprising if you remember who the source was.
I enjoyed this one. It's sharp and funny, insightful and wise to the complex interplay of disparate characters. The Academy enjoyed it too, as the film received four Academy Award nominations, winning two — a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Alan Arkin, and a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for screenwriter Michael Arndt. Not bad for a quirky little film of family dysfunction.
