I admit it. I was a movie-watching freak this weekend. It was cold and snowy, after all. In addition to consuming some Robert Rodriguez flicks and that awful Little Shop movie, I also began my own road to Oscar-fun. As the leader of the Oscar group, my personal philosophy about the show is to try to watch the five Best Picture nominees, at least, before the broadcast. If I make it through those, other films are just icing on the cake, but there are quite a few movies that I have grown interested in seeing this time around, and I'm looking forward to taking them in if at all possible.
I started with Little Miss Sunshine because it's one of the only ones I can rent right now. I'd heard good things almost universally, so I was probably most excited to watch this one of all the nominees available (best picture or no).
I must say, I'm happy with this choice. It may be the frontrunner, and I wouldn't be disappointed if it won.
Obligatory plot summary: little Olive (Abigail Breslin), runner-up in a state beauty pageant, gets the call for the larger-scale competition in California. Trouble is, her slightly dysfunctional, blue collar family, including her "in transition" self-help program-developer father (Greg Kinnear), her mom (the most normal of the bunch, Toni Collette), her brother deep in a vow of silence and Nietzsche-inspired despondency (Paul Dano), her crass drug-addict of a grandfather (Alan Arkin), and her suicidal gay uncle (Steve Carell), all have to ride along with her due to financial and other circumstances. Add to that a 1969 VW Bus that's lost its clutch, and you have a chaotic family thrown into an unbelivably chaotic adventure.
If there is anyone who did not understand this picture or find its nugget of sweetness, I would proffer this viewpoint: you must not be able to relate, at least on some small level, with this family. The first thing I noticed while watching this movie is that there is so much truth to it! Anyone who thinks that this family can't exist in real life is sheltered and ignorant. As I watched this movie, I found elements of me or my family in this family, with the exception of the most extreme dysfunctional symptoms (suicide, heroin use...).
The second thing I noticed was the performances. They were simply breathtaking! It's no wonder Abigail Breslin and Alan Arkin received their Oscar nods in the supporting categories. Who I was most impressed with, however, was Steve Carell. Gosh, everytime I see him, I'm just amazed that this is the same guy who started off on the Daily Show once upon a time. This performance was nothing like anything he'd done before, and he captured the nuances of this tortured character so well. I know that suffering genius in real life, who may have exhibited some of this character's other tendencies to boot. I was just so blown away by it, I really feel that he should have received an Oscar nod too.
The third thing I noticed was the score on this. Now, why didn't this score get nominated? It was so original and so unique to the film, I might go visit the Best Movie Soundtracks group and say so there too.
My biggest complaint about this movie, and there's really only one, is the ending. It was really very abrupt. You see this family finally band together, for one brief moment, around Olive's inappropriate pageant talent ("Super Freak"? I almost died), and then they're in the bus, rolling it in neutral, and then that's it. On the one hand, I get why the ending was abrupt: this film is all about moments. Toni Collette's character kept saying, "We're family, and we're all we've got." And that's true. No matter how much a family frustrates and bickers at each other and flounders in general dysfunction, there are moments when even the most dysfunctional family can abandon those impulses to band together as family. There may not be any long term good feeling there, but those moments occur when they need to occur, and that's reliable and comforting in its simple truth.
On the other hand, perhaps if just one more shot of the family in the bus on their way home had been filmed, showing their individual reactions to what had just happened at the pageant, I would have felt more of a sense of closure. After all, the entire film until they arrived at the pageant revolved around this family's interconnections, verbal and silent, as they drove hundreds of miles from New Mexico in this equally dysfunctional vehicle. It would have been nice to see whether they were happy or frustrated or angry or returned to those states they were in prior to entering that hotel.
I think I would have to rate this film a 9 for perfectly entertaining. It's not a perfect film, but I enjoyed it, and I think, over time, I would forget that the ending left me slightly unfulfilled. In terms of the test, I think it passes. I would buy this because it really is a very sweet movie with a lot of heart, evidenced by this family's united determination to see Olive arrive at the pageant and to compete (despite her odd talent) and then to rally around her and protect her from embarassment when her program did not fit in with the other contestants', all despite the family members' obvious differences. I do not think it is an exploitation of the "loser phenomenon" but rather a study in facing adversity, even when the adversity seems insurmountable. I think this film also reminds us that our lives may not be as bad as they seem, and even if they are, there are ways to triumph and to move on with whatever support we have. In that way, this movie was also profound in its sweetness and was its own little ray of sunshine.