FILM REVIEW – LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE

The title suggests this is going to be a feel good romantic family movie – It is actually a dark satire celebrating the losers in the American Dream – Imagine Arthur Miller’s Death of a salesman with more jokes and you get the right idea – fortunately, the jokes, and characters, are brilliant.

The Hoover family are the ultimate dysfunctional family. The father, Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a power of positive thinking motivational speaker and life coach. His whole philosophy is that you get what you want if you strive for it hard enough. His wife, Sheryl, (Toni Collette), is overworked, and struggles to keep the family going. This isn’t easy as her own brother, Frank Ginsberg (Steve Carrell) is recovering from a failed attempt at suicide, caused by his gay lover beating him to a prestigious and specialized Marcel Proust teaching position. Her son, Dwayne, (Paul Dano), has taken a vow of silence based on his readings of Nietzsche, and wallows in self pity and dreams of becoming a fighter pilot when he grows up. Her father, Edwin, (Alan Arkin, the best known player in the film) is a heroin and cocaine addicted slob, who swears and freely, shamelessly indulges in porn at every opportunity. His habits get him kicked out of the retirement home he has moved to and he too ends up living with his daughter.

The family are in a state of tension and friction, but each one sets their hopes and dreams on the daughter, the precocious Olive, (Abigail Breslin) and they make a huge disproportionate fuss over her when she wins a minor school beauty contest. This earns her the right to enter a Californian big money competition, which she sets her heart on. Olive is pretty, but clearly not charismatic or photogenic enough to win a major beauty contest of this kind.

The various lost jobs have cracked the family financially. The contest is talking glace 800 miles away and they can’t afford to fly, so they head out in there clapped out Volkswagen van (an iconic movie vehicle thanks to this film). As their close proximity drives the family to breaking point on the road trip, the van itself becomes more and more unroad-worthy. They need to push start it whenever they stop, and the horn won’t switch off. Doors fall off, etc.

Richard learns that his positive thinking presentation has failed and that the company who fire him will not use his video film. Frank meets the guy who beat him to the Proust job, and becomes more depressive. Things really reach an all time low when the granddad dies of heroin addiction, and the family find themselves trapped in the limbo land of form filling. When they are refused permission to take the body with them or leave it waiting for their return, they snap, steal it and drive off to make Olive’s dreams come true anyway. Just before they do that, they are hit by another bombshell. Olive amuses herself with picture books on the journey, and one includes a colour blindness test. She tries it out on her wilfully mute brother who discovers that he is really colouring blind. His hopes of being a fighter pilot are crushed in an instant, but the shock breaks his Harpo Marx act.

All hopes now rest on Olive as the potential saviour of the family – and after a struggle to get her name on the competition list after arriving a few minutes late, she is entered into the contest. Only Dwayne fully and rightly suspects that she has no chance against the more polished and professional competitors (all hired from actual competitions of this kind by the film makers).

Olive is the last entry and the last to go on stage – She has taken much of her coaching from her grandfather (Arkin) and the rest of the family has been too self absorbed to pay any thought to what she actually plans to do. Normally this would be the feelgood time where she does something so cute that everyone loves her and the family inherit a fortune. That is not what we get here. Olive launches into a Deeta Von Teeze Burlesque routine that shocks the audience into leaving as the judges desperately try to pull the plugs – the family rally round Olive and dance with her. Arrested, they are ordered never to enter any beauty contests in California ever again. The final shot of the film is them all laughing in the dilapidated Volkswagen, celebrating the fact that they have effectively lost everything – strangely, it does make you feel good despite that. I guess that’s the point. A delightful film filled with eccentric, oddball characters that gradually charm you and become more human the less they gain.

Arthur Chappell