Ok, I saw this movie on Sunday night and, really, it’s not that good.  After watching the film, I found myself at the Esquire, on the other side of the table from two friends who were decidedly unreceptive to this conclusion.  As I downed a rum and coke and some Mozzarella sticks, I tried explaining the badness of the film at considerable length, but could make no headway.

Since then I’ve looked at rottentomatoes.com and noticed that the film scores more than 90% “fresh” and even seen a random blog or two gushing at the the virtues of this film.  But let me reiterate: it’s just not that good.  I mean, it’s not bad.  I gave it, at the Esquire, three stars  (defensible, if a bit generous).

This is a film about a dysfunctional depressed family that takes a road-trip and in so doing discovers their love for life and for one-another.  The trip is taken at the behest of the family’s daughter, who wants to compete in the “Little Miss Sunshine” pageant, despite being the sort of awkward, ungainly, and dazed protagonist that’s now very familiar from films like Napoleon Dynamite, and that seems to have been established with Todd Solondz’s rather unappreciated “Welcome to the Doll House,” back in 1995.

The film thus combines the ungainly dazed adolescent film with with the road-trip film.  And again, the film has its strenghts.  The film is generally well-acted, with Abigail Breslin (the kid) and Alan Arkin (grandpa) providing the film’s real standout performances.  Little Miss Sunshine is at its best when the these two are together–eating ice cream at a restaurant, or talking before bedtime at the hotel. 

However beyond these sweet performances the film, as a story, is not too compelling.  In fact, ranked either against on-the-road movies, or against ungainly dazed adolescent films, this one probably falls towards the low end of the spectrum.  It’s formulaic (guess how the family’s oldest member fares on the long journey?) and repetitive (the repeated push-starts of the old VW Bus are charming, but consume a lot of screen time).  And most of all, the film depends for the payoff at the end of the long journey, on a beauty pageant that set-up a dissapointly  facile comparison of the quirky and openly messed up protagonists with the repressed and vicious organizers of the Little Miss Sunshine pageant.  Relying this easy contrast, Little Miss Sunshine ends up endorsing a self-congratulatory coolness of the outcast that ultimately depends on just the kind of indiscriminate mean-spirited contempt that ungainly outcasts are usually supposed to have suffered themselves.  So, the ending of this film is disappointing.

The film also suffers from annoying little plot problems.  Abigail Breslin’s character puts on a charming surprise performance that distinguishes her from the talented but mainstream pageant entrants.  But how could she have practiced her dance routine without her family having even the faintest clue what this routine consisted of, or the music she was using?  Furthermore, we’re supposed to understand that Breslin’s character has already tried out for this pageant.  How is it then that her parents exhibit such a total lack of knowledge about what their daughter is up against?  etc.

In short, this is a pleasant and watchable film that benefits from strong acting, but that is also overly sentimental in ways that undermine its ability to substantively explore its putative themes.

So there.

[EDIT: Q:  Did I confuse Toni Collette and Abigail Breslin?  A: Not unless you can prove it, bub.]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 at 1:44 pm and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.