Little Miss Sunshine (2006) - 29/10/07 - ****

Review of the Film Little Miss Sunshine (2006) (15)

Advanced warning: this review contains some plot spoilers.

The story behind the 2006 film Little Miss Sunshine has many similarities to the plot of the film itself. Both had a bumpy ride to the finish, both had a sudden and unexpected chance of glory right before the end, and finally… both were let down an inch short of the finish line. But, importantly, those involved did not care. It did not matter. So much had been gained from so little, and completely unexpectedly, (undeservedly?) The film was independently made and struggled to find a distributor, which mirrors the film’s story of a little girl and her family putting so much effort into having her hearts desire fulfilled; competing in the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant, many miles away from where they live. As they reach it just in the nick of time, so also did the films producers find it a distributor just in the nick of time. The films unprecedented success and glorious spiralling of award winning mirrors the success of the family in the film in getting the girl to compete in said beauty contest. But it all falls apart at the end, those others attending the contest do not want people like them there, and kick them out. But they are not left feeling defeated and deflated, quite the opposite in fact! Having come so far and learnt so much along the way, the family is happy enough with what they have managed come away with, which was after all far more than any of them had expected in the first place. The way that this part of the film mirrors the reality of the story behind it is that after being critically acclaimed and stealing away with so many unexpected awards, the films hope for ultimate glory was lost when it missed out on the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 2007 Oscars, for which it had (very surprisingly in my opinion,) been nominated. But of course the film’s makers were far from disappointed, and were in fact simply very surprised and happy to have gotten as far as they had.

Whether the film deserved to be quite as financially and critically successful as it was is a topic that is open to debate. In the opinion of this reviewer, while the film is a decently enough made satirical comedy, it is really not that great a film by any stretch of the imagination. Starting at the beginning, with the screenplay, (which did in fact actually win the 2007 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay), I think that it is in fact a rather weak and predictable plot that the film follows, and that much of the structure of the film is far too methodical in a step by step manner to make it possible for an audience to jump into it with both feet… there is always the feeling that the reality created by the film is not quite real enough, the family just seems a little too conveniently appropriate for the film, with all of its different elements of dysfunction and quirkiness. There is the Father who is living in a dream world where any problem can be overcome by following a simple series of steps, who is present in the story for no other purpose other than to show us that positive thinking isn’t enough when it comes to crunch-time. Then there is the grumpy old Grandfather, who is there largely just for comic-relief but also to teach us a lesson or two along the way… thanks Gramps. Next is the very, very typical teenaged son, who only seems to be there in order to demonstrate to the audience that even though adolescents may look like idiots, they actually do have brains and are just going through the process of working out how to use them. Then we have the Mother, who is the backbone of the family, and a crooked one with slipping vertebras at that, as she struggles to hold everyone together and keep them friends… Penultimately is the suicidal and gay Uncle, apparently there to show us that gays are ’normal’ people too and suicide isn’t stupid, adding more lessons to the films already packed curriculum of them… as if the Grandfather’s weren’t patronising and numerous enough. Finally, of course we have 'Little Miss Sunshine' herself; well, not quite. The strenuously cute, screaming little ball of fun who is the cause of her unusual families road tripping adventures serves to teach us the biggest lessons of all: it’s the taking part that counts and nothing matters more than family! Oh, and that supermodels can eat ice-cream too. These message bearing characters really do nothing more than indicate their creator to be an unnecessarily cynical and tiresomely easygoing member of the human race.

Whilst decently well made, expertly acted (Alan Arkin in particular stands out as the Grandfather, and he won an Academy Award for the role,) as well as enthusiastically directed, the real core of a film is it’s story, and beyond that… it’s message. To me, the message of this film is painfully shallow and hopelessly useless. So long as we’re all friends and we‘ve all done our best, the outcome doesn‘t matter! Surely anyone can see the foolishness in that. To add another positive point to pad out this paragraph, and because I don’t want to come across too harshly as I did actually enjoy Little Miss Sunshine on the whole, (especially on the second viewing…) the choice of music and scoring is generally very good indeed, particularly the pieces performed by the musical ensemble DeVotchKa.

There are a few half decent moments for out-loud laughter, all though not nearly enough for a film that’s been billed as a comedy as well as a drama, and many of it’s jokes fall flat as either clichéd or simply not funny, and when a joke that is obviously meant to be a funny falls flat like that the few seconds afterwards that are there to allow the audience time to finish laughing before the story is continued, can feel very empty indeed… The film’s genuinely disturbing finale makes the most effective but least important (and perhaps most irrelevant…) point of all, as it shows how a child beauty pageant must surely be a huge magnet for paedophiles. But that point is really a bit lost among the films bigger but more poorly portrayed themes and ideas.

The fact that little Abigail Breslin was actually nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar just seems to demonstrate that the film really didn’t deserve many of it’s awards or nominations, as it just seems rather ridiculous that she was nominated because there were many more accomplished and just far better performances by actresses in supporting roles that year. For example, what about Maggie Gyllenhaal in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, or Hilary Swank in Brian De Palma’s The Black Dahlia…? To name only two. It just seems ridiculous.

In finishing, I would like to summarise this review just by saying that this is one of very few films that I recognise as being technically well-made on most levels, but that I do not personally actually like… and in my opinion that reflects badly on the film as a whole; a little like an empty swimming pool… it is a swimming pool, but you can’t swim in it. The films ideas hold no water!

Rating : ****

Written by,

.Peter.D.Marsay.

Originally completed: 29/10/07.