Little Miss Sunshine: A Review

Posted by Mary Rayme Feb 1, 2007

This sweet film, Little Miss Sunshine, focuses on the Hoover family, especially their seven-year-old daughter, Olive, played by Abigail Breslin, who wants to be in a child beauty pageant.

The characters in the Hoover family are all moderately or extremely eccentric. Steve Carell plays a gay Proust scholar, Frank, recovering from a failed suicide attempt. Dwayne, played by Paul Dano, is an angst-ridden and mute teenager who wears black and reads Nietzsche. The overworked mother of Olive and Dwayne is Sheryl, played by Toni Collette. Her husband, Richard, is played by a wonderfully manic Greg Kinnear. Richard’s father is Edwin, played by Alan Arkin, who has just been kicked out of a nursing home for snorting heroine. He is one hip and very funny old man.

So let’s put all these people together into a VW microbus and send them on a road trip where Olive will compete in the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pagaent, as she has been coached by her (crazy) grandfather, Edwin. Through their journey, both literal and metaphoric, they reveal their strengths and weaknesses, but remain held together as a family unit by their love for each other.

We leave the movie with a little song and dance, but it is a musical number that not all in the beauty pageant audience appreciate which makes it all the more delicious to those of us who are in on the idea that pageants, especially for children, are shallow and pretentious. In the post-JonBenet era, this is something we can all agree to dislike.

For me, this movie was fun, unpredictable and a little like John Waters meets the Coen Brothers. No wonder Little Miss Sunshine has been given 4 Academy Award nominations including that of Best Picture for 2006. Alan Arkin has been nominated for Best Supporting Actor and the amazing Abigail Bresline has been nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Little Miss Sunshine has also been nominated for Best Original Screenplay. Stay tuned. Oscar time is coming soon and there is plenty of Sunshine to go around.