A Review of Little Miss Sunshine
by Belle Mahoney

Little Miss Sunshine is a dark comedy about a family: the insane kind that people actually have. The story follows the Hoovers on their journey to get their daughter to the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant. Steve Carrell, Toni Collette, Greg Kinnear, and Alan Arkin are perfectly cast together in this irreverent farce.

Frank (Carrell) - a depressed homosexual thwarted in love and recently homeless ex-professor of Proust - has recently attempted suicide, and his sister Cheryl has brought him to live with her family. Cheryl (Collette) is married to Richard (Kinnear): a man who thrives on his positive attitude, being a winner (not a loser), and forcing his insecurities upon his daughter. Meanwhile, Cheryl, between smoking in secret and screaming on her phone, tries not to notice that her family is on the road to crazy-town while she and Richard hopelessly slide from perfect, uptight parents to out-of-control, desperate, and bankrupt. Richard's father (Arkin), a foulmouthed heroin snorter, has also moved in after being thrown out of the rest home. Their son Dwayne is fifteen with black hair and a pained expression; he reads Nietzsche, wears a "Jesus Was Wrong" shirt, and has taken a vow of silence. Finally there is Olive, a seven-year-old with enormous glasses, red cowgirl boots, enthusiasm, and obsessed with becoming a beauty queen. She is the only person who gets along with her grandfather, and he takes it upon himself to "coach" her for the pageant. "Welcome to hell," Dwayne writes on a notepad when Frank comes to live in his room.

Richard, as obsessed as his daughter with the beauty pageant, drops everything to get the family into a yellow VW van that needs a rolling start and drive from Albuquerque to California. Along the way, Dwayne gets advice from his grandfather about sleeping with as many underage girls as possible while he's young and not to do heroin until he's old; Olive is left behind at a gas station; the van's horn gets stuck in place and causes a scene involving a motorcycle cop, porn, and a dead body ("We're going to be normal here," says Richard, on the brink of breaking); some highly illegal actions take place; Dwayne has an outburst after nine months of silence only to discover that Frank is the only one in his family he can talk to, and the rest of the family grows more insane by the minute. As Proust would say, maybe suffering makes you who you are.

The Hoovers end up shocking the audience, and themselves, when they start to find what really matters in the midst of the sickly world of child beauty pageants. The final scene of this unorthodox masterpiece is one of a kind. Life is a series of beauty pageants where, as Dwayne says, you "do what you love and fuck the rest."

Score: 4.5 tiaras out of 5.

:: return to Columns ::