Live Life Team
What a funny little film! “Little Miss Sunshine” is a road film that follows none of the typical road film conventions. A middle-class family travels from their hometown so that the daughter can compete in a pageant. The family is a standard, nuclear group: husband, wife, son, daughter, wife’s gay brother who has just been released from hospital after a failed suicide attempt, husband’s elderly father who is addicted to cocaine. Along the way, subtle aspects of their dysfunction come out in funny, unexpected ways.
The real surprises come not when a character breaks free from the trap of the family or their own personality, but when they wiggle just a little loose from it. For example, the husband (Greg Kinnear) takes off one night to confront the book publisher who’s been avoiding his call and forces him to turn down his book. For a moment, I found myself hoping he’d take the hint that his book is pitiful and move on with his life. But he stands up for himself, tells the publisher that he’s a fool for turning his book down, and won me over completely.
Alan Arkin won an Oscar for playing the grandfather and the film also won an Oscar for its screenplay. But the real success may be that the film received a total of four nominations, including Best Picture. It had no chance of winning (Scorsese finally got his), but for my money, this was clearly one of the best films of the year.
