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Heads up, readers: be prepared for a million references to Leo
Tolstoy’s famous line “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy
family is unhappy in its own way.” (the opening line of
ANNA KARENINA) as the Sundance crowd-pleaser
LITTLE
MISS SUNSHINE begins its runs at a theater near you.
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"Jonathan and I both feel very strongly that
movies don’t need to be strictly comedy or strictly drama… I think
we’re probably, as people, very anti-label, and it was much more
interesting for us to do a comedy that wasn’t a ‘this kind’ of
comedy; we’ve always been sort of a hard directing team to label."
--Co-director Valerie Faris
LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE opened in Manhattan on
July 28 & will roll-out to selected cities
across the USA in August.
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The Hoover family stuffs
itself into an old VW van
& heads west in the Sundance crowd-pleaser
LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE.
Photo Credit: Eric Lee |
The assertion itself, so simply put, is open to question. In the
hundred years since
Tolstoy’s death in 1910, countless anthropologists, economists,
political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists have all done
academic research, and polemicists have addressed the topic from every
possible perspective from religious fundamentalism to radical
feminism. At this point, who among us would dare to declare that any
an individual family, including our own, was either “happy” or
“unhappy” full stop?
Creative artists were mining family life for great material even
before Sophocles wrote
OEDIPUS REX,
and will no doubt continue to do so. As post-Freudians, however, we
should just accept the simple fact that the average family will have
its tragic days and its comic days and probably also experience every
gradation in between.
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Meet the Hoovers
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Relaxing in a roadside restaurant (from
left to right): Alan Arkin (“Grandpa”), Steve Carell (“Uncle
Frank”), Paul Dano (“Dwayne”),
Abigail Breslin (“Olive”), Toni Collette (“Sheryl”), & Greg
Kinnear (“Richard”).
Photo Credit: Eric Lee
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When the six ‘Hoovers’ stuff themselves into an old VW
bus and head west, they’re a thoroughly modern family, that is a
non-nuclear mishmash. In this and so many other ways they’re much
closer to “the Joads” (who took a similar path to the new “promised
land” of California in
THE GRAPES OF WRATH), than to that ‘50s exemplar “the Cleavers” of
LEAVE IT TO BEAVER
fame. Sheryl and Richard (Collette and Kinnear) have a daughter (Breslin),
but Sheryl also has a son from her first marriage (Dano) and a gay
brother (Carell), while Richard brings his father (Arkin) into the
mix.
At the beginning of the film, all of these characters exist in their
own individual bubbles. Only Sheryl, the typically over-stressed
middle-class Mom, puts any priority on the ties that bind them all
together. But when Olive suddenly advances to the final round of the
“Little Miss Sunshine” pageant, it’s all or nothing; everyone must go
or no one can go, so off they go. “Hilarious consequences ensue,” and
by the grand finale they’ve all taken the
Three Musketeers pledge: “One for all, and all for one.” Haven’t
we seen all this before? Actually, no.
 What
distinguishes LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE is the directors’ commitment to
real life. Even though every scene is grounded in those that came
before it and the final scene is a forgone conclusion, the trajectory
still supports several pleasant surprises and the film has many tiny
moments that are refreshingly unpredictable – just like real life.
LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE was directed by the husband-and-wife team of
Jonathan Dayton and
Valerie Faris. This
is their feature debut after years of success directing music videos
and television shows such as the Emmy-nominated comedy series MR. SHOW
WITH BOB AND DAVID. Married for over 17 years, Dayton and Faris bring
to the screen evidence of a successful partnership built on constant
communication and openness to multiple points of view. The result is a
film that’s genuinely “lived in,” and I loved it.
I confess that I’m often annoyed by films about kids. I hate watching
films in which kids do things kids don’t ever really do and seem to
know things they couldn’t possibly know. So when I tell you that Olive
completely won me over, I’m telling you a fact that surprised me.
She’s no mere “ugly duckling” in the beauty pageant context, she’s the
fish who’s totally out of water, and yet her inner spark is
irresistible and her love of life is totally contagious. Will the
other contestants in the “Little Miss Sunshine” pageant (played not by
actresses but by girls from actual beauty pageants) hate this film
when they see it? I suspect that those who love pageants for their own
sake, as Olive clearly does, will also love the film, but those who
compete primarily to satisfy others will hate it. Olive loves to
perform, and the rest of the Hoovers pull themselves together for her
sake; sometimes you win just by showing up.
So ignore the critics who reduce LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE to a comedy
about a dysfunctional family. The Hoover family simply functions “in
its own way,” just like yours and mine.
Follow this
link to read my chat with Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris.
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Jan Lisa Huttner is the managing editor of
Films for Two: The Online Guide for
Busy Couples. In addition to freelance work for a variety of print
and online publications, Jan writes regular columns for the
JUF News, Chicago's
Jewish community monthly, and
Chicago Woman, a
bi-monthly published by The Woman's Newspapers. She is an active
member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Illinois
Woman's Press Association.
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LITTLE
MISS SUNSHINE: