okay

Rating: 6/10 (28 July 2006)

Spoilers limited to this review's end.
Steve Carrell's presence motivated my watching, and he does his first real acting job here. Every character he played on The Daily Show was "Constipated Failure-prone Man," with the wrinkles for The Office being that he's also "Overbearing but Needy Boss" with "poorly disguised Racist tendencies." And he performed that character well and I always laughed. But the character he plays here is the nice normal guy you'd want to be friends with, and he plays it well.
Essentially this movie is a character piece on 5 flawed people working for one little girl's dream and becoming slightly better people in the process. I appreciated the fact that no one's problems were instantly solved by the movie's end, the fact that the humor was understated and allowed to happen instead of forced, and the fact that the movie totally avoided toilet humor (that was nice).
Sadly, I saw the movie in a theatre full of idiots who guffawed and laughed and talked at every tiny second of near-whimsicality, even when things weren't that funny. "She's going to cry now." Really? Thank you for telling me that, idiot in the seat in front of me, I really couldn't tell from the tears welling up in her eyes, but now you've enhanced the movie for me! But that's just an argument against theatres in general, not Little Mrs. Sunshine itself.
I also liked the two philosophies competing in the movie, Nietszchean Nihilism and retreat from the world and Proustian character-building suffering, and the way they were subtly developed before Carrell's speech at the end. The two characters affiliated with either philosopher were the only two without any severe emotional problems. It's not *that* funny. It's not bad. But I could not abide by the way the filmmaker tried to play both sides of the issue between making fun of a child beauty pageant because it objectifies preteens for their sex appeal, and alternately having the little girl's onstage stripping be considered "sweet" because she was mentally innocent. And the use of the genteel "Well, I NEVER!" character? I hate that archetype; writers needed to stop using it in 1990.
S**P**O**I**L**E**R**S**!
Grandpa takes a moral stance that at his age, he might as well do heroin because he doesn't have long to live anyway so why not risk life for the drug pleasure? Well and good, but that's a baldfaced argument to make if you're not at least going to acknowledge the more longterm effects of H, like massive personality shifts and the destructive manic search for more money to get your next fix. But what really egged me was the way he OD's on the crank, and then a character goes "well, it was his time," as if Heroin were the same as the natural aging process. If you're going to make the argument for legalization or at least use of H, make it, but the way it was presented skirted the whole issue even when the facts were there.
And furthermore, how stupid did the parents have to be to let their little girl "practice her routine" with a known heroin user in a locked door without ever observing a practice or asking the girl to show them what grandpa was teaching her? I'm surprised he wasn't committing sexual abuse. And there's not a better note to end on than that, huh?