DVD Review: Little Miss Sunshine

A suicidal, homosexual Proust scholar. A win-at-all-costs motivational speaker. A Nietzsche-obsessed teenager who has taken a vow of silence. A foul-mouthed, heroine-using WWII veteran. A working mom desperately trying to hang on. And a precocious seven-year-old aspiring beauty queen. This is not the group of people you would choose to take a road trip with. But that’s what the directors of Little Miss Sunshine ask you to do.

At its core Little Miss Sunshine is a road movie. A family on the road, on a quest to get their daughter to a beauty pagent 700 miles away. It’s a comedy, so things go wrong along the way, and the oddly-matched characters don’t always get along. But there is more to it than that. The overriding theme is that it’s not only ok to be different, to be an outsider, but it’s actually preferred to conforming. Each of the characters represents this in some way.

Grandpa, the heroine-using veteran, has a “fuck you, I’m doing my own thing” attitude. He was kicked out of his nursing home for refusing to obey their rules. He doesn’t filter his speech for anyone’s sake. He started using heroine as an old man, because “that’s the time to do it”. He has lived a long life, and learned that the only path to take is one’s own.

Dwayne, the Nietzsche-obsessed teenager, has taken a vow of silence until he reaches his goal of going to the Air Force Academy to become a fighter pilot. He doesn’t have any friends. He proclaims early on that he “hates everyone”, including his family. He explains that all he wants from them is to be left alone.

Frank, the Proust scholar, recently attempted suicide because he had been pushed to the margins in all aspects of his life. He suffered through an unrequited love affair, only to lose the object of his affection to his professional rival. He lost his teaching job, his apartment, and his will to live. His life on the margins became too much for him to bear.

Richard, the father, is a failing motivational speaker, whose attitude is best summed up when he says “Sarcasm is losers trying to bring winners down to their level.” He serves as the foil to the individualistic characters, emploring everyone to be a winner, and ultimately to fit in.

A menagerie like this is difficult to pull off believably in a movie. The characters tend to become charactures, often to the point of making a mockery of themselves. But directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Feris manage to make each of these characters feel like real, three-dimensional people. Each of the characters faces challenges throughout the story and each of them changes in some way. In the wrong hands this movie could have turned into RV, or a bad knockoff of National Lampoon’s Vacation. It’s a testament to the directors that they managed to make if funny without being a farce. Absurd without being ridiculous. And sad without being maudlin.

There are enough funny moments in Little Miss Sunshine to categorize it as a comedy, but in calling it simply a comedy doesn’t do justice to the several heart-wrenching moments. So let’s just categorize it as “the best movie I’ve seen all year”.
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