Little Miss Sunshine, directed by Jonathan Dayton and
Valerie Faris from a screenplay by Michael Arndt, is a likable
little movie about the American ethos, which it is not unique in
finding in the idea of getting ahead, of being a winner not a
loser. Greg Kinnear plays Richard, who is a walking paradox: the
failed designer of a self-help success course called “The 9-Step
Refuse-to-Lose Program.” But he’s no hypocrite. True to his
philosophy, he refuses to lose — or at least to acknowledge
himself a loser — which makes him even more of a loser to
everybody but himself. His antithesis is his brother-in-law, Frank,
played against type by Steve Carell. Frank is a gay Proust scholar
who has recently been betrayed by his grad-student lover with his
great scholarly rival and who has attempted suicide as a result.
Now he comes to live with his sister, Sheryl (Toni Collette), who
is Richard’s wife, Richard and Sheryl’s two children and Richard’s
foul-mouthed, obscene, drug-addicted father, played by the great
Alan Arkin.
The children are Dwayne (Paul Dano), a Nietzsche-fancying
quasi-Goth teenage depressive who has taken a vow not to speak
until he becomes a Marine pilot, and Olive (Abigail Breslin), a
not-especially-attractive child of nine who has her sights set on
becoming a beauty queen. When the winner of a pre-pubescent beauty
contest in which Olive managed to finish as runner-up cannot
perform her duties, the little girl is invited to go to California
to compete in the “Little Miss Sunshine” pageant. Richard sees this
contest as a test of his own prescriptions for success, and anyway
Stan Grossman (Bryan Cranston), his last hope of finding a market
for the Refuse-to-Lose Program, is to be found on the way in
Arizona. So the family, including Frank and Grandpa, is packed into
an aging Volkswagen bus — the failure of whose clutch means that
everyone has to get out and push it up to speed after every stop —
and they rush to make the contest in time in spite of one mishap
after another along the way.
There’s a lot of comedy in these rather familiar travel
disasters as in the sniping between the main characters. “Uncle
Frank gave up on himself,” Richard tells his children. “That’s
something that winners never do.” But the strength of the film lies
more in the contradictions within the characters than in those
between them. While Richard’s relentlessly upbeat personality
always hints of tragedy, Frank’s theatrical misery is inescapably
comic. Exposed to Frank’s irony, Richard earnestly says that
“sarcasm is the refuge of losers; it’s losers’ way of bringing
winners down to their level.” Meanwhile, Frank is so lost in
self-pity that when his sister tearfully tells him, “I’m glad
you’re still here,” he doesn’t think twice about replying: “That
makes one of us.” Yet he finds a kind of soul-mate in self-pity in
Dwayne, who with equally unconscious humor wears a T-shirt
emblazoned with the words: “Jesus Was Wrong!” When Frank is forced
to share a bedroom with the non-speaking Dwayne, the latter
scribbles on a pad: “Welcome to Hell.”
“Coming from you, that means a lot,” says Frank.
Nevertheless, he assures Dwayne that he won’t attempt suicide
again while they are sharing a room. It is one of many indications
that, underneath their apparent hostility to one another, the
family is bound together by real love and affection. Not that the
hostility cannot at times be terrifying. When Dwayne finally speaks
it is to lash out at everybody, and especially those who hold out
to him the consolation of the family. “I don’t want to be your
family. I hate you. You’re all f******* losers: divorce, bankrupt,
suicide.” We see that both he and Olive have adopted as their own
Richard’s success-worship — and with it have become even more
miserable than their father. Olive confides in her mother her
anxieties about the contest: “I don’t want to be a loser,” she
says. “Daddy hates losers.”
Another film would make this a conclusive and unappealable
indictment against Richard, but Little Miss Sunshine has
the courage not to make him a monster. Instead, he is merely one of
the two poles at the rather ridiculous extremes of human nature,
and poor Sheryl is left to spend her time trying to hold the line
between the grim optimism of Richard and the luxurious despair of
Frank. Meanwhile, Grandpa’s interest in pornography and hard drugs
— “I’m old!” he says. “When you’re old, you’re crazy
not to do it” — and his instruction of Dwayne in the
virtues of promiscuity prove to be no bar to his acting as coach to
little Olive for the song-and-dance routine meant to manifest her
“talent” in the contest. This performance, when it finally comes at
the climax of the picture, is all that we might have expected it to
be, yet it reflects much more harshly on the creepy people who run
such contests than it does on Grandpa.
I was a little disappointed that the movie didn’t spend more
time on Richard’s failed prescription for success, Refuse-to-Lose.
There seems to much more to be done with this than simply to have
Richard accept, for the moment at least, his losses in the end.
“It’s not the program, Richard,” says Stan Grossman when Richard
finally tracks him down. “It’s you. Nobody knows who you are…
It’s time to move on.”
The apparent inability to move on is the only thing that these
comical bus-pushers have in common and, sure enough, at first
Richard does what he always does by vowing to redouble his efforts.
“This is what the nine steps are all about,” he says. But in the
end, he and Frank both have to learn from Olive, who inadvertently
teaches the whole family that sometimes the greater honor is in
failure than in success.
