Let’s go back just over 10 years ago, to 2006. In a surprise move, Little Miss Sunshine was put into the 5 movies nominated for Best Picture. Side note: Let’s ignore the fact that most of the best movies from that year were NOT nominated (Pan’s Labyrinth, United 93, Children of Men). The Departed won the Best Picture Oscar, and rightfully so. Can you name the other nominees? No? They were Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima, and the Queen. Yes, those 3 films are perfectly lovely and built for Oscar contention, but none of them have the standing in society that Little Miss Sunshine does. This movie is so charming that even Oscar voters connected with its family centric dramedy about a dysfunctional clan supporting their youngest in her bid to win a beauty pageant.
The pageant in question is the title of the movie, Little Miss Sunshine. Olive Hoover (Abagail Breslin) from Albuquerque gets into the contest, so her crazy family agrees to drive her in an old school Volkswagen yellow bus. The family is not only bringing literal baggage, but mental baggage as well, except for Grandpa Edwin (Alan Arkin) who’s carpe dieming. Patriarch Richard (Greg Kinnear) is struggling to publish his self help book to the frustration of his wife Sheryl (Toni Collette), Sheryl’s brother Frank (Steve Carell) failed a suicide attempt and is in recovery, and Olive’s half-brother Dwayne (Paul Dano) has taken a vow of silence in preparation to be an Air Force pilot. This crazy bunch of weirdos head toward the pageant, where everything goes fine, and the movie ends.
Ok, that’s not what happens, obviously. Many of these problems and issues the family is having are clearly going to bubble up and butt against one another. The wonder of Michael Arndt’s screenplay is how well he balances the tones in Little Miss Sunshine. Despite the bubbly adorable Olive, Little Miss Sunshine contains a layer of despair and sadness. All the adults have deferred or faltering dreams of themselves they are trying to keep afloat, but unable to do so. Real stakes like that give the movie relatable stakes for the audience to connect to. The risk of great but despondent backstories for the characters is that those stories could overwhelm the movie with despair and consume the poor Olive. So for every brutal conversation Frank has, there’s the great image of the family running into the VW fan while it is moving because the fan only starts that way. Moreover, these transitions weave nicely into one another. Here’s an example, a heroin user in the movie has something awful happen to them, which leads to a really hilarious scenario involving medical costs for certain procedures in California, when then leads to a really sad realization due to a color blindness test. I’m being vague due to plot details, but you get the idea. Driving the whole of Little Miss Sunshine though is the fact that this family is in it for Olive, and as time goes on, for each other. As funny as the beauty pageant performance actually is, the reason it’s so memorable is that Olive’s family has her back and is there for her when they need her.
Directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton also have another key weapon other than Arndt’s stellar screenplay: an intimidatingly good cast of acting talent. Abagail Breslin is adorable and exciting as Olive, getting the audience easily in her corner. She asks questions with an innocence and warmth that make her instantly likable. She plays well off of Alan Arkin, who won an Oscar for his role as Grandpa. Arkin’s basically in an actor’s dream role: a quote fest with some emotional backing that defines the course of the end of the movie. Greg Kinnear and Toni Collette are those actors you’ll instantly recognize, but maybe not know by name. Kinnear takes a pretty awful guy and gives him a loving smile, just wanting to make good for his family, and Collette plays exasperated but empathetic very well. Most people knew Steve Carell as a mentally challenged weatherman, but no one really thought he could do something as emotionally complex as uncle Frank. Carell underplays the role, which is the perfect note for the introspective character. He also has nice exchanges with Dano, who I had never heard of before this film. We all know he’s gonna break his vow of silence at some point, and when it does it comes out like years of pent up teenage fire, but underneath is a dissatisfaction with the status quo and a desire to find his place in the world. The best scenes of the movie are when the family is shooting the sh*t in the van, or in a hospital’s office, or at a beauty pageant, letting the acting talent shine through.
As twee as Little Miss Sunshine can be, it’s still quite the great indie film, with really long and important resonance in the movie world. Don’t believe me? This was Michael Arndt’s first screenplay; this movie was so well liked he went on to write good Tom Cruise and Jennifer Lawrence movies, a little 2015 indie movie featuring Han Solo, and the greatest Pixar Movie of all time. And that’s just the screenplay writer….