Little Miss Sunshine
There’s one inspired, uproarious satirical barb in “Little Miss Sunshine.” Since it comes at the climax, I will caution SPOILERS AHEAD before discussing it.
When she finally makes it to the Little Miss Sunshine child beauty pageant, 7-year-old Olive Hoover (Abigail Breslin) is in over her head. She loves pageants but dresses and performs as if she’s never particiated in one or even seen one. Amid a gaggle of JonBenet Ramseys, she exudes an oblivious personal style. And when it’s time for her dance routine, writer Michael Arndt and directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris lay bare the perversity of teased and tarted-up little girls strutting their stuff on a stage: Olive does a striptease. Perhaps she knows more about pageants, and their creepy subtext, than she’s letting on. Brilliant.
END SPOILERS. The rest of “Little Miss Sunshine” bored me. It’s an exercise in machine-tooled quirkiness that panders to independent-minded audiences. Besides Olive, who dresses like she stepped out of a low-budget 80s aerobics video, Arndt gives us: a failed motivational speaker (Greg Kinnear); his grungy, lecherous, heroin-snorting father (Alan Arkin); his mute-by-choice, Nietzsche-loving son (Paul Dano); and his brother-in-law (Steve Carell), a gay, suicidal Proust scholar. His wife (Toni Collette) gets to be the sane center of gravity, presumably because Arndt couldn’t think up any more quirks. When they have to drive from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach, Calif., for the pageant, they take a yellow VW bus. Why? Because they’re weird!
The entire movie succumbs to such circular logic. The characters are bloodless conduits for self-conscious wackiness. The motives for their behavior range from vague to mysterious. Arndt, Dayton and Faris never establish a plausible milieu — they just pile on the silly. Yet because it’s a clever, literate sort of silly, and it’s played by smart, respectable actors, it comes across as intelligent. “Little Miss Sunshine” has about as much to say about who we are and how we live as “Airplane!” does, and “Airplane!” is a hell of a lot funnier.
(By the way, I saw the movie with my wife and my parents, and they have urged me to note that they all thoroughly enjoyed it. I still love them, and I believe they feel the same way about me.)