When dreaming the wrong dream

Rating: 8/10 (6 October 2006)

I hadn't seen my grandmother in a little while and decided to take her out to the cinema yesterday afternoon. She normally doesn't enjoy dramas, so we both opted for this comedy, Little Miss Sunshine. What a delightfully cynical, yet ultimately big-hearted movie this was! Perhaps not hugely original in all its aspects (for example, Greg Kinnear's was a bit of a stock character...), though still very fresh, very funny and unexpectedly in the end, heart-warming without the least bit of schmaltz or manipulative slyness. It got better and better, culminating in some classic sequences by the last quarter.
I left the cinema smiling at its ultimate message, a modern and more sensible twist on the usual "American dream" message (one of success as a means of measuring one's ultimate worth as a human being). As the suicidal, Proust-scholar uncle and his Nietzsche-loving nephew tell each other at one point, this movie believes that what ultimately really matters is that one should end up doing the things in life that really make one feel happy. A simple, but valuable message - one that could avoid so many neuroses if it were truly grasped by the vast majority of the world's population. Also, many of the movie's characters learnt that if it turns out you're not good enough for something - say, something you've been dreaming of achieving all your life - it usually means that that thing isn't actually good enough for YOU, and that you should hanker after something that's right and worthy of you. Basically, you can't fit a star-shaped peg into a heart-shaped hole. We can all be misled by the wrong dream, and it's all just a part of living this life to learn this, and move on - seeking out something that's more right for us, for the individual that WE are.
The little girl actress who played Olive was adorable and never in a precocious brat kind of way - this is saying something, as I often have a problem with child-actors for this very reason. The characters were generally all great - and oh, the grand-dad! He did crack me up, as well as my grandmother! And the final scene in the last 10 minutes, with the whole family dancing to Olive's tune at that grotesque beauty pageant was good enough to give you a natural high, like visual cocaine. Here in Rome where I watched the movie, it had the whole cinema in stitches - and I went to the mid-afternoon showing with my grandmother, so it was mainly other grannies who were there! But even to them, that scene was exhilarating. An intelligent, fluffy yet non-superficial feel-good movie with a core of unexpected wisdom.