LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE (2005) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris
Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Steve Carell
Alan Arkin, Paul Dano, Abigail Breslin
A typical (dysfunctional) middle-class family hits the road, heading west out of Albuquerque in a reluctant Volkswagen bus. There's Dad (Greg Kinnear), a desperately upbeat self-help guru pitching his "nine-step program" to empty college classrooms. Teenaged son Dwayne (Paul Dano), who reads Nietzache all day and has taken a vow of silence until he's accepted to the Air Force Academy. Grandpa (Alan Arkin), a foul-mouthed lech with a fondness for heroin. Uncle Frank (Steve Carell), a gay Proust scholar who's just survived a suicide attempt. Seven-year Olive (Abigail Breslin), whose chance to compete in a beauty pageant in Redondo Beach is the reason for the trip. And Mom (Toni Collette), whose resilience and resolve are the main thing holding the group together. You spend the first 20 or 30 minutes of this learning about the ways these people grate on each other. For the next hour, you get to know how their complex social dynamic works, and how much they depend on each other in the face of rejection, failure and plain old bad luck. Then a key family member leaves the scene, the movie shifts more into sitcom territory, and something gets lost. It's still pretty funny, though. The climactic beauty pageant, with little girls in swimsuits strutting and posing like underaged showgirls, capped by Breslin's bump-and-grind dance routine to the Rick James strip-joint standard "Super Freak", makes you wonder what the filmmakers were thinking. Whether it qualifies as perverse social satire, or just horrifying bad taste, is up to you.
Alan Arkin
(1934-2023)
