message in the movies By Rev. Bruce Batchelor Glader

             
Little Miss Sunshine Rated R
Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Farris.  Starring Greg Kinnear and Steve Carell.  


Photos © Copyright Fox Searchlight Pictures

Little Miss Sunshine is a film of considerable charm that works really hard to not be so charming.  What could be more American than loading the family in a VW bus to take your 7-year-old daughter to a beauty pageant?  Especially when the family in question is as well acquainted with disappointment and failure as the Hoovers.  Richard, the father (Kinnear) is a motivational speaker who is incredibly unsuccessful in his career. Richard’s brother-in-law Steve (Carell) is coming to live with the family after a failed suicide attempt (after losing his lover, his job as professor at a local university AND coming in second-place for a genius grant).  Grandpa (Alan Arkin) is living with the family after being kicked out of a retirement center for promiscuous sex and drug use.  Son Dwayne (Paul Dano) is nine months into a vow of silence while awaiting acceptance into flight school.  Mom Sherry (Toni Collette) is just trying to hold things together.  When Olive (Abigail Breslin) gets accepted at the last minute to make the finals of a local beauty pageant (700 miles from Albuquerque, where the family lives), this ragtag bunch of characters get loaded, kicking and screaming, into a VW bus which has seen better days.  As you can gather, this is a group only the movies could produce.  While the performances are great and there are some good laughs, it was hard to conceive the Hoovers as a real family (The Simpsons have more of a bond.).  The family members are so mean and self-possessed at the beginning of the film, I had a hard time accepting the growth and redemption that takes place during the journey.  Grandpa’s lifestyle is particularly vulgar and crude; it is only the likeable performance by Alan Arkin that makes you care about him.  There are some big laughs and a few (far-fetched) surprises along the way and the top-notch cast delivers the goods.  Watch out for dangerous curves; the movie has more than a few crude scenes and the VW bus has to steer sharply to avoid falling into the enormous plot holes.  The film is, in spite of these problems, life-affirming and thoughtful about what makes for a successful and happy life.

Pitchfork Rating: Three halos.  (A critique of the American Dream for a new millennium.)  Three pitchforks. (Crude language, profanity, and some bad taste jokes are now regular R-rated film staples; there is also some brief looks at the covers of pornographic magazines and some recreational drug use by Grandpa; some borderline salacious stuff with the little beauty queens, too, although the film is also commenting – and judging – the vapidity of such competitions.)

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