This year, Sundance's morsel of independent goodness is Little Miss Sunshine

Rating: 10/10 (10 August 2006)

Little Miss Sunshine reviewed by Sam Osborn
rating: 4 out of 4
The Sundance Film Festival has always been a kind of clunky ordeal. I've never attended, granted, but the films that are swept up by the thirsty studios and brought to mainstream audiences are so unreliable that buying a ticket is more like placing a bet. The level of quality control for the festival is a damned roller coaster. On the other hand, since 2004 I've annually handed out a four star review to a film birthed at Sundance (Garden State, Brick). This year, Sundance's morsel of independent goodness is Little Miss Sunshine.
The film doesn't smell of the rawness that often lingers behind the ears of other Sundance hits. Little Miss Sunshine runs on quirk and maturity, often revealing itself to contain an honest sense of experience and a deep understanding of the mechanics of middle-class family life.
In its most basic form, Little Miss Sunshine is an awkward travelogue, documenting the zany cross-country road trip a family makes to put their daughter, Olive (Abigail Breslin), into the annual Little Miss Sunshine Beauty Pageant. But the travelogue mold is malleable and shifts to fit the stories of each family member as they all slowly crumble. Greg Kinnear plays Richard, a champion of his own nine step self-help program who's struggling to find an audience. He's obsessed with winners and disgusted by losers, the only two types of people in his world, and forces his family to endure endless diatribes on the everyday applications of his nine steps. Sheryl (Toni Collette), his wife, seems weary of the infamous nine steps, but endures it if it'll put food on her table. The seats at her table have recently increased, though, with the induction of Sheryl's brother Frank (Steve Carell) who's arrived back from the hospital after an attempted suicide. Frank was the former leading Marcel Proust scholar until a vicious love triangle with two other men resulted in his romantic betrayer becoming the leading Proust scholar and Frank finding himself unemployed. He mixes well with Dwayne, the fifteen year-old son who's decided to take a vow of silence because of Nietzsche. Dwayne writes on a piece of paper to Frank, "I hate everyone," and, looking back at him, Frank seems to understand. Functioning as the bright and bubbly center of the whole debacle is the seven year-old daughter, Olive, who's beautifully naive to the failures of her family, innocently bouncing along to her own lovely rhythm. Her talent at the beauty pageant will be dancing, and her crude, absurd Grandpa (Alan Arkin) is always helping with her mysterious rehearsal.
Things start bad at home, but only get worse on the road. And the farther they get, the more dreary the family's situation becomes. Soon their very foundation has fallen out from beneath them and all they have is what's in front of them and what's in front of them, for better or worse, is the Little Miss Sunshine contest. And as the family loses more and falls further away from Richard's central theme of "winning", the more the Little Miss Sunshine contest becomes the family's very livelihood.
But amongst all the sadness and turmoil, the screenplay holds tight to its sense of humor. Even while dissecting emotions of the most harrowing sort: depression, sorrow, suicidal anger, hate--it never once fails to find quirk in the normal and delight in the ordinary. Other family portraits that delve into dysfunction and honesty leave us phoning a shrink and asking for samples of Prozac. Little Miss Sunshine wants nothing to do with lulling us into a depressed stupor.
Abigail Breslin, the little girl who plays Olive, is unexplainably wonderful. Her type of strange is so cute that it could be bottled up and sold for billions. She could very well be the elixir of youth because only one look at her dancing to her headphones and wearing a sweatband and cowboy boots, closing her eyes to better feel the music behind huge, round glasses, and it's enough to let us forget all the complexities and intricate annoyances of adulthood. I don't mean to go on about Miss Breslin, as the other actors are nearly as strong and all deserve special mention, but Olive really does steal the show.
Little Miss Sunshine strikes on many of the sad, ornery notes of realism in middle-class family life. Things break down and so too, it seems, that life breaks down with it. For this family, life seems to be escaping them and all they've left to do is to not let it escape their Olive. It's a mad dash of a picture; one with a pulse and great humor that muffles the heartbreak of the world. And pain like that can only be muffled by sunshine.
Copyright ©2006 Sam Osborn. All rights reserved.