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Movie Reviews, & Film Industry Commentary
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2006 – R – 103 min.
Director: Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris
Primary Cast: Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Steve Carell, Paul Dano, Abigail Breslin, Alan Arkin
Stars *** 1/2 (of 5)
Popcorn *** (of 5)
Film Type(s): Comedy, Dysfunctional Family, Road Trip, Competition
Synopsis: When glasses wearing seven-year-old girl Olive Hoover (Breslin) desperately wants to win the Little Miss Sunshine Beauty Contest, her entire dysfunctional family is coerced into taking their beaten up VW Bus to California for the finals. Patriarch Richard (Kinnear) is having trouble motivating his motivational program, while his wife, Sheryl (Collette), gets increasingly annoyed with him for it. Add into the mix Arkin’s creatively profane grandfather, Dano’s Nietzsche-obsessed and silent teenage brother, and Carell’s suicidal Proust scholar Uncle whose male lover has just left him for the man that got his Genius Grant. This is Directors’ Dayton and Faris’ first foray into feature filmmaking after directing music videos.
Review: Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, this dysfunctional family comedy at first seems to be about a beauty contest, but then it becomes apparent that it is about a journey and philosophy for life. The start of the film illustrates each of the characters in their private moments and how they struggle to do well in their lives, and yet are riddled with self-doubt. In this way, we see the excellent acting being done, whether it be Kinnear’s flailing motivational speaker becoming increasingly vengeful with his ‘Nine Steps’ towards his family, or Carell as the gay Uncle who has close calls with suicidal thoughts, or Collette’s Matriarch simply trying to keep the family together. We also get to see the irony in the title, that things are not perfect. It also shows that the reason this film is a comedy, is that humor arises from situations, not just people. Arkin’s performance as the heroin-snorting curmudgeon Grandfather proves to be the key. His character’s philosophies are brutally pointblank and with his later absence, forces the other characters to reconsider their circumstances, turning each of their then revealed weaknesses into strengths (Was that a step in the motivational program? Might be.) Reflecting the beginning, the film ends with the family as a single unit, acting as a team, helping and defending the others, where outsiders attack their unusual choices. Like many recent independent films (Sideways, Lost in Translation), this movie is not uplifting per se, but it becomes endearing in its abrupt honesty about how a family (albeit a weird one) can fail and succeed to function as a unit. The scripting is excellent, always maintaining the characters as a family first and foremost and a genuine sense of the characters as real people. Highlights include the VW Bus’ many malfunctions, a hospital escape that will have you on the floor laughing, the highway exit mishap that puts Uncle Frank running, and the dead-on skewering of the talent competitions at girl’s beauty pageants.
Awards Likely: It has received Golden Globe nominations for Best Comedy and Best Comedy Actress (Collette) and has been placed on the ‘Top 10’ lists for the National Board of Review and American Film Institute. The film also received a number of Independent Spirit award nominations. It is likely to get an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
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