LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE (2006)
Feature film debut of commercial and music video directing pair (and married pair, evidently) Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. This is only noteworthy because Little Miss Sunshine isn’t plagued by the same unnecessary fireworks that choke the films of other crossovers from that world to this (Michael Bay, Dominic Sena, and Tony Scott, to name some names).
The characters are reduced, for digestibility, for ease of being transformed into gags, to a single trait (quirk, really) each. They are all rolled out at the beginning of the film, unceremoniously and mechanically. The quirks, with few exceptions, are too strainingly quirky to really resemble humanity; we aren’t trusted with the textures in them, the facets of difference that must occur in each person’s day. We are only allowed the single trait in each that is exploited in the comedy tin mine. This is unfortunate, since it is that texture in a character that makes the oddball traits all the funnier.
Little Miss Sunshine does, to its credit, have a sense of economy about it. It moves quickly form set-up to main conceit without breaking a sweat, and without seeming to dawdle in the family’s (unsurprisingly) quirky home life.
The main conceit is a road trip from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach (Hermosa? One of the Beaches, anyway.) to enter bespectacled sever-year-old Olive in the titular beauty contest. We see Olive’s pre-mature frumpiness at the onset (the first image of the film is its best: a taped beauty contest reflected in Olive’s huge awkward glasses). It’s not hard to imagine that Olive is out of her depth in the beauty contest. Harder to see is that she got in in the first place (evidently, she placed second in a qualifying contest, and the winner had been disqualified for some reason. We aren’t allowed to see this improbability; we’re expected to trust its verity from a phone call).
This allows us a full VW bus load of quirk: Wannabe self-help guru, who is the last to know that he’s the biggest loser in the group; heroin sniffing geriatric, live-in father of the self-help guru; gay Proust scholar, who is also a recent suicide attempt; Nietzsche reading fifteen year old, who’s made a vow of silence until he enters the Air Force flight school (why? Again, something we’re told, but not shown: the character we’re given can’t possibly have any martial intentions); Olive, the would-be beauty queen; and the long-suffering wife, mother, daughter-in-law, sister to all these walking quirks, one woman straight-man to five gags. Toni Collete handles herself well enough with what she’s given in that part, but also seems to be in a different film more often than not (a better one, by the way).
There are few surprises to be had on the road. But that’s probably where the easy pacing, the good sense of lean economy, come in to save Little Miss Sunshine. It is clichéd, and hackneyed material, but the gags come by fast enough and lightly enough to keep the rot from setting in, at least until the end.
Little Miss Sunshine’s final act, the beauty contest itself, strains credibility and plausibility well past the breaking point. Remember that, by this point, we’re stretched pretty thin as it is. By then we have been expected to believe that the Proust scholar happens to bump into the object of his romantic affections–in a gas station in the middle of an Arizona highway–who is supposed to be more than 2500 miles away, in New Haven, Connecticut. This happens at that point in the film, prescribed by Syd Field, for this character to have what is called a character beat, or maybe it’s a story beat; what ever it is, it’s this lock-step rhythm that makes this film tin-eared and false.
Also right on schedule is the showdown wannabe self-help guru’s agent; also conveniently near-by (also in Arizona, but also near enough to be reached by a short scooter’s ride, an unnecessary and lazy gag, used up already by Dumb and Dumber). One is left wondering if the entire country has gathered in Arizona for some form of intervention for this particular bus load of people.
So, after these things, it is too much to ask us to buy the slapstick, the convolutions, and the sheer length of the climax. The film that has been moving at a nice clip until now comes to a grinding halt when it reaches the beauty contest. Too much time is spent on the other contestants. Too much time is spent cleaning up and finishing our last little bits of the other characters’ stories.
Too much to bear is Olive’s performance itself, which is dragged out and stretched to one big slapstick for the entire bus load to get up on stage (they’ve driven halfway across the country, after all; their legs must need to stretch) and start to boogie.
This scene was meant, I guess, to express rebellion and individuality. That’s a strange concept in a film not about fully articulated and realized individuals, but about personality traits–gags, really.
Too much, then, is that we aren’t expected, as an audience, to expect more humanity, more plausibility, more truthfulness from films like this.
HDFEST RATING:
Overall: C
Acting: B+ (with the exception of Toni Collette, who is–again–a solid A-)
Plot: C
Originality: D
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