Trite and boring

Rating: 2/10 (22 December 2006)

I wonder if our movie choices are so diminished that we applaud films like Little Miss Sunshine simply because they're supposed to be about "real people"--as opposed to being about model-gorgeous twenties-somethings falling in love or idiot teenagers being offed by spree killers. Otherwise, I'm at a loss to understand LMS's appeal.
The main characters--I don't even know their names--are complete clichés. The harried mother. The clueless father. The irascible grandfather who barks out inappropriate sentiments. These characters could be played by anyone--and they are, on any given sitcom. And the quiet desperation of their lives--the fast-food dinners, the self-help dribble that passes for thought, the tired resignation that stands in for character--this is what Hollywood imagines real people's lives are like. But there's no more truth here than there is in 50s musicals. The fact that this movie has the gloss (or dullness, I suppose) of a faux-indie film doesn't make it truthful. The plot suffers from the same asinine clichés as the characters. Could anyone not see, a hundred miles off, that the VW van would break down? And stuffing Grampa in the truck? Yep, that's what everyone would do. Ride around in the desert with the rotting corpse of a relative in your car just so that your kid wouldn't miss a minor beauty pageant. There's quirky and funny, and then there's inane.
The only characters with a spark of ingenuity are the kids. Olive comes as close to being a normal kid as I've seen in any movie in ages. And I even liked the sullen teenager. I understood him--I wouldn't want to talk to these people either. But even in their stories, there are big gaps in logic. Why would a Nietzsche-reading outsider want to join the Air Force? And when Olive arrives at the LMS contest, she's so clearly out of her element that it was painful. It's obvious she has no idea how beauty contests work, but at the beginning of the movie, the mother explains that Olive has been going to contests. In fact, that's how she got into LMS. And what about her routine--seriously, her parents had NO clue what the kid was doing before she got up on stage?
And speaking of the routine, how is teaching your eight-year-old granddaughter to do stripper moves to Rick James better than slapping make-up on her and ratting her hair? If Olive had come out and done a simple kids' dance routine that ended up looking innocent and sweetly dorky next to the polished weirdness of the other little beauty queens, that would've made sense. But to have her pull her pants off to Superfreak was as unsavory as the rest of the pageant. But I guess we weren't supposed to expect much from a man who'd do heroin in the same hotel room as his granddaughter. That would just make us prudes, wouldn't it?
And for those reviewers who think this is somehow a brilliant insight into the dissolution of the American dream, get a grip. This is a sloppy half-gesture from writers who couldn't even be bothered to rise above trite characters and inane plot devices.