LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
Fox Searchlight
Grade: B+
Directed by: Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris
Written by: Michael Arndt
Cast: Alan Arkin, Abigail Breslin, Steve Carell, Toni Collette,
Paul Dano, Greg Kinnear
Screened at: Dolby 88, NYC, 7/6/06
Opens: July 26, 2006 People who do not especially like their families are fond of saying, “You can pick your friends, but you can’t choose your parents.” Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, using Michael Arndt’s razor-sharp script, pay homage to the saying while at the same time, they subvert the idea. In other words, families may not be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but in the end, there’s nothing like them. Families matter. With a balanced blend of farcical situations and sorrowful occurrences, “Little Miss Sunshine” takes us into a contest that needs no parody. Beauty contests are silly (just like the fashion shows sent up by David Frankel in “The Devil Wears Prada”), but they’re especially goofy, even perverse, when the contestants are seven years old. While “Sunshine” spends ample time to prove this point, Dayton and Faris’s story is a road movie involving a diverse group of family members, each with his or her special vulnerabilities and buttons that regularly get pushed. The destination is almost irrelevant: the journey is everything. A broken-down Volkswagon vehicle that punctuates the family dysfunction stands in for a similarly splintered family. The bus, disabled during a 700 mile trip from Albuquerque to California’s Redondo Beach, never really gets fixed. Yet the ways that this family coaxes the bus to function, however badly, is apt metaphor for the partially disabled qualities of its inhabitants. While each performer stands in for a particular problem, there is nothing cartoonish about its members. These are fleshed-out human beings. For example, Richard (Greg Kinnear) pushes a nine-step program to convert losers into winners. As though describing his own family, he tells a sparse audience that winners are those who do not give up. Trying counts. Failure can be expected and should not cause winners to buckle under. He tries to sell his program nationally but fails miserably. His wife Sheryl (Toni Collette) has a more limited role. She’s dismayed by Richard’s faith in a useless program but works to keep the family together most of the time. Dwayne (Paul Dano), their teen son, looks forward to becoming a fighter pilot. Until then, he refuses to speak, communicating with written notes (“I hate everybody”) and misinterpreting Nietzsche. Grandpa (Alan Arkin), who lives with his son’s family, uses heroin, complains about “chicken again!” and advises the silent lad to have sex with not just one woman but lots of women. Sheryl’s brother Frank (Steve Carell)–who resembles Iran’s psycho president–has recovered from a suicide attempt that he made after losing out on a genius grant and getting fired for hitting on a young man in his college class. As catalyst, 7-year-old Olive (Abigail Breslin), hardly a model of beauty beneath her oversize spectacles and pinned-back hair, screams with ecstasy when chosen to compete in the annual Miss Sunshine contest in California. There’s nothing like being cooped up in a room or in a car to bring family discontents to the surface. On the other hand, the very foibles of the disparate members can help such a group to bond. With a top-notch cast (particularly Greg Kinnear in perhaps his best, most sincere role) and not a false move anywhere, “Little Miss Sunshine” presciently conveys to a skeptical audience that there’s no place like home–for the holidays and any other time. Rated R. 102 minutes 2006 by Harvey Karten
harveycritic@cs.com Member: NY Film Critics Online | 
