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Little Miss Sunshine September 4, 2006 |
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A surprise hit at the box office during the waning weeks of the summer, “Little Miss Sunshine” is the kind of off-the-wall family comedy that is just sweet enough, and at times just realistic enough, to counter balance the highly unlikely events that befall an extended family on one particularly nutty road trip west. Young Olive (Abigail Breslin) is obsessed with beauty pageantry and one day is invited to compete in the California Miss Sunshine pageant, but her family, consisting of frustrated, over-worked mother Sheryl (Toni Collette), struggling self help guru father Richard (Greg Kinnear, having a great year with this, “Invincible”, and the fall’s “Fast Food Nation”), a grumpy, drug addicted grandfather (Alan Arkin), morose self imposed mute brother Dwayne (Paul Dano), and depressed gay uncle Frank (Steve Carrell) is too poor, and/or dysfunctional to organize a proper trip in time to get the girl the necessary 800 miles to the show. For one, uncle Frank can’t be left alone, coming off of a botched suicide attempt, and nobody feels comfortable leaving him with either Grandpa or the highly anti-social Dwayne, so the only solution to the problem is cramming the entire pack into an old VW bus, one that unfortunately only shifts gears while doing 15 or higher (a comedic plot point that routinely has the family pushing the dilapidated thing on the side of the highway to achieve the right speed), where the varied personalities, and strains of each character’s own troubles, leads to much bickering and confrontation. Along the way, as in most road movies, there are stops that feel overly written and unrealistically wacky – like a scene in a hospital where the family tries to sneak a dead body out of a back window – but most of the scenes of the family in the VW are genuine and authentic, with mature little Olive often serving as the voice of reason, or moderator, in her older relatives arguments, and when they finally reach the pageant, the film takes on a satirical edge that suggest what most logical people already know, that 8-year-old girls in bathing suits singing show tunes in make-up and bronzer is scatologically disturbing. “Little Miss Sunshine”, one of the Sundance Film Festival’s biggest winners this year, benefits from an All Star cast and an instant breakthrough in adorable Abigail Breslin, whose bespectacled face and pudgy frame seems out of place amongst the living Barbie dolls of the pageant circuit (I think that’s the point though), and though it strains the plausibility of the road film genre at times, its sweet Simpsonian family ethics and sharp screenplay, not to mention that hilariously defective VW Bus, makes it one of the better independent finds of the year, and a rightful late summer crowd pleaser. by Adam Suraf |