Progressive Wednesday

The TGIF Movie Review: Little Miss Sunshine

Of the five flicks up for an Oscar for Best Picture, I’ve seen exactly deux: The Departed (which, if there’s celluloid justice, will earn Scorsese his first statuette) and Little Miss Sunshine. As much as I adored Marty’s movie, my heart is pining for something a bit more solar to win the big one.

Little Miss Sunshine is a film about the Hoovers:

• Richard, played by Greg Kinnear, is the creator of a highly unsuccessful 9-step program for life success called “Refuse to Lose.”
• Toni Collette plays Sheryl, the mother of the Hoover clan, who tries to be the supportive, if harried, glue binding the family together.
• Steve Carell, the star of The Office, plays Frank, a gay, suicidal, unemployed Proust-scholar (yes, you read that right) recently jilted by a younger lover.
• Dwayne, played by Paul Dano, is an existential teen who’s taken a vow of silence until he can become a fighter pilot.
• Alan Arkin, in a comedic role I dig more than his turn in Slums of Beverly Hills, plays Edwin, the grandfather of the group. He happens to be addicted to heroin and vulgarity.
• The star of the film though is Olive, a 7-year-old would-be beauty-pageant winner, played brilliantly by Abigail Breslin.

The thrust of the story is fairly simple: Olive has a chance to participate in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant, and the family has to make the 800-mile trek from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Redondo Beach, California by VW van so that she can have her chance to win. What happens along the way are a series of ridiculous and serious setbacks for most every member of the Hoover family. I’d rather not mention any of them so as not to spoil the dish.

I will say this: the movie helps us see the goal-driven misfits in each of us, for as it turns out, we’re all reflections in fun-house mirrors.

And I will share some choice quotes I jotted down when I watched it:

• “Olive, you’re getting big. Almost like a real person.”
• “When you’re old, you’re crazy not to do [smack].”
• “We’ll let you go off the hook, but only if you never enlist in a beauty pageant in the state of California ever again.”
• “I can say what I want — I still got Nazi bullets in my ass.”
• “High school — those are your prime suffering years. You don’t get better suffering than that.”
• “Listen to me, I got no reason to lie to you, don’t make the same mistakes I made when I was young. !&%$ a lotta women kid, not just one woman, a lotta women.”
• “Who is that? Nietzsche? So you stopped talking because of Friedrich Nietzsche? Far out.”
• “You tried to do something on your own which is more than most people ever do.”
• “Everybody just pretend to be normal.”

The movie is a lesson in love, the importance of the quest over the spoils, self-sufficiency, feminism (the film is a delightful middle finger to beauty pageants), and the potency of family. Or to quote reviewer Richard Corliss, the movie hopes “to make America forget what makes it gloomy.” ‘Tis true. Rent or buy the sucker today, and start the first night of your weekend with a little light.

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