Little Miss Sunshine (Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris, 2006)

[David Ehrenstein]

For instance, the superficial way that Nietzsche and Proust are used throughout the film, and the embarrassing discussion about Proust masquerading as some kind of profound lesson on life, struck me as a forced attempt to turn a family comedy into something smarter and more literate than it actually is.

Neither Nietzsche nor Proust is used in the film in such a fashion. They're the obsessions of the son and the brother respectively and what's important is the way these two differently alienated characters come to help one other.

[sevenarts]

If I'm wary of this film, it's because it represents the further watering down of "independent" film, due in part to Hollywood's method of shutting out any film with modest ambitions. Every review I read, this "quirky comedy" is called something like "the little movie that could." For me, this is the epitome of a Hollywood film, a genuine crowd-pleaser, a heartwarming comedy that can appeal to pretty much anybody, as opposed to just 14-year old boys, like most action films, or middle-aged housewives, like romantic comedies... I don't blame the film itself; it's Hollywood's fault, but the fact that this film made nearly every reviewer's top ten list is a testament to the paucity of well-executeed formula films (as opposed to poorly executed formula films), and maybe a hint (that will be ignored) that Hollywood should start spending less money on films, and more effort putting out a decent product; likewise, the fact that the film has been hailed as some kind of triumph of independent film suggests that people, including film reviewers, should get out and watch more films.

I think this post is pretty on target, actually, even though I really enjoyed the film. Is it Godard or Bergman or even Alexander Payne? No, obviously not, and the film certainly doesn't pretend to be more than it is -- a light, funny, well-acted, clever film. I don't think it's a total Hollywood bit of fluff, contrary to what some in this are saying. There's a good amount of substance there: a celebration of difference and discord that you don't see in many mainstream American films, and a very unconventional approach to the concept of the "dysfunctional family" comedy. Mainly though, it was just a really funny movie -- I was laughing and smiling the whole way through, and when I left the theater I just felt really good. It's not too often I walk out of a mainstream multiplex (no, I didn't see it an arthouse theater) feeling that good about the film I just saw.

So I think the main problem, if there is a problem, is not this very well-done film, but the fact that it's now been super-hyped and acclaimed and blown up -- because there really is a paucity of this kind of film. There are plenty of dumb, substanceless mainstream flicks, and there are plenty of arty, deep indepedent films, but there's not all that many like this one that have broad, mainstream appeal while still maintaining some intelligence and depth. I wouldn't mind seeing Hollywood taken over by fare of this caliber.

[JabbaTheSlut]

Little Miss Sunshine

The so-indie-it-hurts Little Miss Sunshine, hits the road in search of America only to find a country that sucks out loud. Let's run it down: here, being young sucks, being old sucks, dying sucks, health-care bureaucracy sucks, beauty pageants suck, being middle-class sucks, being homosexual sucks more than you could possibly imagine, dysfunctional families suck, of course our obsession with bodily aesthetics sucks because true beauty is more than skin deep. With the exception of its hateful depiction of Steve Carell's suicidal gay university professor—whose wrist bandages are emblems of his sexual self-loathing—there's nothing in Sunshine's pasteboard characters and sitcom complexity that any reasonable human being could possibly disagree with. Which is superficially fine: but in its consensus-building, the film doesn't hazard anything even mildly novel, shamelessly name-checking Marcel Proust to gloss over a staggeringly facile thesis and dupe folks into believing that this comedy has a backbone of Substance. Audiences starved for profundity will glom onto anything with even a hint of art-house pretension; the intellectual arbitrage perpetrated by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris is so canny let's just call them the directors of the year. —J Crawford

Well put, thinks I.

[Michael]

Stupidly put. The gay scholar committed suicide because his partner dumped him for another guy and not only that, the new boyfriend "stole" all the credit from that scholar. It had nothing to do with sexual self-loathing. Straight folks can do the same thing over divorcing, etc. Being gay is never presented as an issue in Little Miss Sunshine.

[davebert]

Well, with the exception of the grandpa's homophobic comments. I didn't mind the movie, it had some decent parts, but a lot of it felt like it was just trying too hard (plus the road movie genre seems to be done by the numbers here), so I don't buy at all into the raves.

[exte]

Just read this:

Redford also offered tough talk about the commercialization surrounding Sundance, which reached new heights last year with the $10.5 million sale of "Little Miss Sunshine" to Fox Searchlight. "We program it like a film festival and not a market," Redford said sternly. "Buyers are continuously asking, 'What's this? What's that? Is there going to be a breakout hit?' which I don't really care about."

I thought I read somewhere on here that Fox produced it, questioning it's 'indieness' but it sounds to me like it was ind-financed...

[portnoy]

Just read this:

Redford also offered tough talk about the commercialization surrounding Sundance, which reached new heights last year with the $10.5 million sale of "Little Miss Sunshine" to Fox Searchlight. "We program it like a film festival and not a market," Redford said sternly. "Buyers are continuously asking, 'What's this? What's that? Is there going to be a breakout hit?' which I don't really care about."

I thought I read somewhere on here that Fox produced it, questioning it's 'indieness' but it sounds to me like it was ind-financed...

...by Deep River Productions, the production company that made Big Momma's House 2.

[King of Kong]

I just saw Little Miss Sunshine. Started strongly enough, turned into a pile of sentimental gloop. Think Harold and Maude meets National Lampoon's Vacation, in terms of a dysfunctional family of oh-so-quirky characters experiencing trials and tribulations on a silly road-trip. Another in a growing line of indie-by-numbers fluffballs.

[lord_clyde]

Another in a growing line of indie-by-numbers fluffballs.

Yeah, but this fluffball might win several Oscars, including the big one. Was last year really such a weak year for the cinema? This is the kind of movie I would have seen when I was fourteen and instantly put on my 'top ten movies of all time!!!' list. That is to say at age fourteen I though I was hot shit because I knew who Stanley Kubrick was and I had seen EVERY Tarantino film and the Usual Suspects THREE TIMES!

Huh, that was a retarded way of saying I think LMS is overrated. Apologies.

[colinr0380]

Spoiler warning:

Having finally seen this I'd agree with montgomery's and sevenart's comments. I quite enjoyed the film, which although felt kind of Wes Anderson-esque without the stylisation in showing every member of the family being beaten down by having their dreams dashed while the cute little girl is the only one running around happily, was quite touching in the scene where the damaged family members finally see the true horror of the beauty pageant and suddenly want to protect their youngest family member from the humiliation they've all experienced. Strangely I felt the opposite way to King of Kong in that I was a little disappointed by the early scenes and the way that each family member's specific problems all came to a head during that exact couple of days (suicide attempt, self-help book falling through, a sudden death), yet the beauty pageant seemed to redeem it a lot - maybe not enough to make me feel it was a great film, but enough to like the effort put into showing this family, with all its still unresolved problems, still able to work together as a family at the most difficult times.

I thought there was an interesting parallel to that final concert scene in About A Boy, with Toni Collette playing a similar mother figure who doesn't seem to realise her child might be about to commit social suicide until it is pointed out to her. While the child's reasons are different in the two films (Olive doesn't want to make a point, just dance! The grandpa wanted to make the point!), the films both feature adults getting on stage to absorb the negative reaction of the audience.

There is also a nice small role for Beth Grant, seemingly continuing her character from Donnie Darko into this film (although she doesn't get lines as funny as she had in Richard Kelly's film, and this could be an example of an 'independent' arm of a Hollywood studio getting an actor to reprise a role from an actual indie).

[cinemartin]

This film is just National Lampoon's Vacation except without the fun. Or comedy.

[colinr0380]

SpoilerShow

I'm not sure the fun or comedy were the main intention of the film though. While Vacation was a comedy with Chevy Chase's nervous breakdown on reaching the theme park a big dramatic moment, Little Miss Sunshine feels more like a drama with Abigail Breslin's response to where her grandpa is now: "He's in the trunk" a big comic moment. It feels like they are in the same tragi-comic genre but the elements are mixed in different proportions to weight them more to one side or the other.

In another example, certain moments of the film could be criticised for not being enough like Weekend At Bernie's! I guess because Alan Arkin wasn't up for gags about people manhandling his corpse to pretend he was still alive! But also because it wasn't the tone the filmmakers were going for and having the body covered by a sheet all the time lets the character maintain a little bit of dignity (while being practical in not having to bring Arkin in to play a dead body for however long it took to shoot those scenes!)