A uncontrolled train: is what looks like the Hoover family in the comedy Little Miss Sunshine, an exception to the sameness of the independent cinema

Rating: Null/10 (16 October 2006)

There isn't in Little Miss Sunshine no character that, with a variation here and there, hasn't frequented so many other American independent movies. Check in here the inefficacious father, the stressed mother, the rebelled son, the suicidal uncle, the grandfather that lost the reins - those abbreviated figures which the filmmakers of the genre had stipulated to express that something smells bad in the American dream. Or, more precisely, that it became a nightmare, and the personal and familiar misalignment is the only possible consequence for a society that as each day passes sees itself even more divided between "winners" and "losers", with the last not knowing how to transpose the abyss that separates them from the first. What is really surprising in this comedy is the way, however, that it transforms in strong points this elements that should be its weakness. Right from the start, a plate of resistance of the genre - the classic family dinner scene - demonstrates, first, that these typical roles were delivered to actors capable of making them exceptional; and, second, that the couple of directors formed by Jonathan Daylon and Valerie Paris have an uncommon sense of timing and detail. While the Hoovers swallow with lemon soda the fried chicken bought in a snack bar, their reunion at the table slowly takes the shape of a derailed train: the youngest daughter wants to know why the uncle tried to kill himself, and, in the discussion that forms about the most appropriated answer, it is almost possible to hear the noise of the iron of this derailed train twisting itself.
The girl, without wanting, continues in the function of pivot of discords. Interpreted by Abigail Breslin, of Signs, with no trace of prematurity, Olivia has craze for infantile beauty contests. Because of a desistance, she is called to compete in a match in California. The father (Greg Kinnear) that tries but doesn't manage to set up a self-help program of his creation, is at the eaves of the bankruptcy and doesn't have money to pay for aerial tickets. The mother (Toni Collete) refuses to leave behind her suicidal brother (Steve Carell), the son that has stopped talking for months (Paul Dano) or the vitiated in heroin and in pornography father-in-law (Alan Arkin), since it is obvious that none of the three is apt to give assistance to the other two. The solution is to travel all together in an old Kombi, crossing states under the heat and mutually annoying one another. The trip is extremely bad and the arrival to the destination, even worse: with her little belly, her homemade fantasy and the shameful choreography that the grandfather taught her, Olivia, so far star of only innocent regional events, contrasts in every possible manner with the spooky precocious prostitutes convoked for the national competition.
As is of custom, this choke has an instructive effect on the family. What isn't of custom, and even more instructive, is that the couple of directors does not attribute to the conflict divergence of values. Even so on the basis they seem to be divided between the superficial, the incredules and the resigned, the Hoovers have much more cohesion then what it is assumed, and what disaggregates them is so only the fact of reacting to the situation in different ways (even so unanimously desperate), their accelerated sideslip in route to poverty and what they imagine that is then the end of all and any perspective of future. (The clue to this, by the way, is in their last name, an ironic tribute to Herbert Hoover, American president during the Great Depression of the 30's.) What Little Miss Sunshine wants, however, is not to relativize the impact of financial ruin on a family. It is only to remember that much of what haunts the Americans today is fruit of their own imagination.