Daily Blague

Little Miss Sunshine is the second film that I've seen this year in which middle class struggles and aspirations are satirized - but satirized almost lovingly. "Look what jerks we are," these films say - the other, of course, is American Dreamz - "and it's very funny, but do you think we could do a little better?" Little Miss Sunshine, furthermore, rather stubbornly refuses to solve most of the problems that come up in the course of the movie, suggesting an alternative to the American dream that life is a mess that can be cleaned up. For these reasons, I don't expect it to be the big hit that critics would like it to be.

The amazing thing about the movie is how quickly and surely it establishes the mood of tract-house dinge. When Dwayne (Paul Dano) hands a note to his uncle (Steve Carrell), "Welcome to hell" (Dwayne has given up speaking for the time being), the audience is on the welcoming committee. The preceding family dinner - a homemade salad with takeout fried chicken and corn, Sprite, and frozen pops - has been so exquisitely choreographed that you know what this particular hell is all about: stressed disorder. The Hoover family gets by on sheer inertia.

The immediate cause of the family's dysfunction is Richard (Greg Kinnear), a would-be motivational speaker with hopes for a book deal that you know are doomed from the despair with which he addresses his cell phone. Richard believes in nine steps to winning, and is almost monstrously upbeat. He talks to his wife, Sheryl (Toni Colette), and children, Dwayne and Olive (Abigail Breslin), as if they were clients, but he speaks his cant in the tones of a discouraging scold. Sheryl seems a good sort, overworked at whatever she does (I was never clear on this) and squeezed by her housewifely duties. Richard's father (Alan Arkin) lives with the Hoovers - because he's been thrown out of his retirement home, for snorting heroin among other things. (It's a habit that he hasn't kicked.) When the story begins, Sheryl is saddled with responsibility for her brother, a gay professor, once the leading American Proust scholar, whose life self-destructed when a grad student with whom he fell in love fell in love with the second-best Proust scholar. All the performances are top-notch, but I have to single out Mr Carrell for a truly extraordinary job. He smolders with repressed fury - actually, "smoldering" suggests some sort of movement, but Mr Carrell is as still as a statue - but never leaves comedy territory. He is the tacit conscience of Little Miss Sunshine. As the minor disasters pile up around him, you can feel his incredulity. How on earth did we make this mess?

The story-line is simplicity itself. When they learn that Olive has become, by default, a contestant in a juvenile beauty pageant, the Hoovers decide to take a family drive, from their home in Albuquerque to Redondo Beach in California, in a Volkswagen bus. The bus looks fairly recent, but it's yet another determining signal to the audience: there will be a need for repairs. Most of the movie is devoted to the drive up Calvary. But the last twenty minutes or so, set at the beauty pageant - you can't believe that the Hoovers made it - are thoroughly redemptive. The other contestants are ghastly little jezebels who flaunt a veiled but wholly inappropriate sexuality. Olive's act, which perhaps her parents were unwise to let her learn from and work on with her grandfather, speaks truth to decadence. It is very exhilarating for a minute or two, and then it is mortifying, absolutely mortifying. (I was embarrassed for the actors, whom I imagined asking themselves how they'd ever been witless enough to sign on for the project.) The directors have a perfect little ending in store, however, and the movie definitely ends "too soon." You want a little more, if only of Steve Carrell.

Three other performances must be hailed: Beth Grant as the harridan pageant director (the sort of role that she's all too good in), Robert O'Connor as the scary pageant MC (he made me feel that I was in one of those fiercely grinning horror movies), and Paula Newsome as a bereavement counselor (don't ask). Now that I look more closely, I can say that Mary Lynn Rajskub, who was so good in Firewall, is very good in a tiny part.

Little Miss Sunshine is an elegant movie about extremes of inelegance. I hope you won't miss it.