Little Miss Sunshine
Written by Michael Arndt
Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris
Fox Searchlight
2006
Rating:


"Little Miss Sunshine" works best if it's considered as a parody of the "indie" film genre, or at least as a summation of every Sundance crowd-pleaser spawned by the film festival over the past 20 years, including "Hairspray," "Welcome to the Dollhouse," "Love and Death on Long Island," "Happy, Texas," "Garden State," "Thumbsucker" and "Napoleon Dynamite." Taken any other way, "Little Miss Sunshine" can only be seen as a deliriously derivative work.

As if working from a Syd Field-ian diagram of indie plot points and characterizations, Michael Arndt's script provides a contemptibly motivational father (Greg Kinnear), a put-upon wife (Toni Collette), an angst-ridden son (Paul Dano), a blindly optimistic daughter (Abigail Breslin), a suicidal gay uncle (Steve Carell) and a perverted grandfather (Alan Arkin). Continuing to check off indie mainstays, the film is filled with quirk, a road movie structure, Murphy's Law-induced plot points and the let's-put-on-a-show finale of a Christopher Guest movie where the daughter performs at the Little Miss Sunshine pageant for a hypocritical commentary on American views of beauty and success.

Following Arndt's lead, directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris bring hermetic idiosyncrasy to the mise en scθne, whether it's in the condescending manner they focus on the Hoover family's collection of McDonald's glasses or the way they carefully frame the family's dilapidated yellow Volkswagen bus.

When not pandering to elitists or reveling in obvious irony, "Little Miss Sunshine" contains occasional rays of delight, like Carell's wonderful run through a hotel. The film's minor joys are largely due to the exceptional cast, which uniformly loves the characters while the screenwriter and directors view them with derision.

Posted Friday, January 5, 2007

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/little.miss.sunshine