per ardua ad astra

Rating: 9/10 (10 February 2007)

What a well-written and acted film! I loved the fact that is was a spoof of both road movies and the beauty contest theme. All the men suffered a disaster while on the road, while the woman and the girl just suffered and carried on. My favorite shot was when the boy was sulking and the mother then the sister came to talk to him with the bus and the other three framing the closeup on the skyline above. I particularly liked Steve Carrell, the gay suicidal brother, who appears to be a TV star with a very busy movie agenda these days. His resemblance to Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, just adds to the allure. Of course these child beauty contests are truly awful and the other contestants, with their coy mimicry of adult female sexuality, were genuinely pornographic. Olive's strip tease was not because she was just herself. It is a profound commentary on America that one is tolerated and encouraged, while the other is pilloried and banned. Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his radical book on education, Emile, said that any child can be trained up to play a Mozart violin sonata on the dining table for an adult audience, if s/he does little else. The trick is to find ways of allowing children to do what they are uniquely capable of at a given age, just be being themselves. I couldn't help think of my four-year-old daughter in relation to Olive. She is so brave and yet as vulnerable as any other kid. Beautiful on the inside and on the outside, like my other, much older daughter. The strength of the script lay in its awful depiction of the nightmare of family life, with the final transcendent unity not forced at all.