LITTLE MISS BLEAAAARRGGGHH
"At the most basic level, it is nearly impossible to dislike Little Miss Sunshine." Not true. Right here, hand raised, dislike in action even as we speak. I've had a little rant brewing on this most overrated of 2006 trifles since I finally caught it on DVD back in December, and I figured I might as well get it down on paper (or whatever) before the Oscars. If LMS wins Best Picture, it'll be the biggest triumph of feel-gooder mediocrity over, y'know, legitimately good moviemaking since...um, last year.
Okay, I will say this: Little Miss Sunshine isn't exactly bad, per se. Everybody involved seems to have put their all into it--I mean I've got no bad words to say about Alan Arkin or Steve Carell (well, I kinda do--see below), and as far as weirdly precocious child actors go, Abigail Breslin is less annoying than most. Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris made a whole lot of swell music videos before LMS, and they certainly demonstrate a lot of potential in their feature debut. I liked the Devotchka song "How It Ends" before I saw the movie, and it was nice to hear it in various permutations throughout the film. There is a lot to like about Little Miss Sunshine.
But all these talented people are bringing their considerable gifts to bear in service to a story that, in the end, says very little we don't already know. The real-life story of the ordeals writer Michael Arndt went through to bring his story to the screen, and his eventual success (WGA award, an almost certain Best Screenplay Oscar, deal to write Toy Story 3, etc.), are the kinds of things that make you feel warm and fuzzy about Making It in Hollywood, and make people like me a little jealous (full disclosure). It's a movie about the little guys, made by the little guys, and that's the kind of thing you want to get behind. But get behind it I shan't. The script is a mess, an odd mix of broad comedy and emotional heaviness that never gels into anything coherent. It's possible to strike this balance and make it work--see for instance Wes Anderson's Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums (yeah, I know I'm a fanboy, but that doesn't mean it's not true--and even he couldn't quite pull it off in The Life Aquatic, though his cowriter Noah Baumbach did in his own The Squid and the Whale). The characters are all broadly drawn types--suicidal gay intellectual, winning-obsessed striver, randy grampa, etc.--and it's only through the excellent work of the actors that they become anything resembling real people. And that would be fine, except LMS isn't trying to be a broad comedy, it's trying to be an insightful portrait of the American family (and, by extension, America). The melancholy yet driving "How It Ends" underscores nearly the entire movie--that ain't comedy music. That's Quirky Indie Drama music. The music is being used to take the audience to a place emotionally that the story can't--and hey, you know, that's filmmaking, but it's also a bit of a cheat. The broadness of the characters and the contrived situations prevent the drama from having as much impact as intended. The family's decision to all take the little yellow van to the beauty pageant is so contrived it reminded me of Lloyd and Harry deciding to go on their road trip in Dumb & Dumber. (Speaking of which, LMS also borrows a scooter gag from D&D, with diminishing returns.) And again, that would be fine for a goofy comedy, but that's not the tone LMS is aiming for. If it was, it would have to be funnier.
The humor in Little Miss Sunshine is, with few exceptions (most involving Arkin), supremely lazy: the repetition of "Did I ever tell you I'm America's number one Proust scholar," which wasn't that funny the first time; the use of the chicken bucket and (specifically, strangely) Sprite as condescending shorthand for This Is What Has Become of the Modern Family; the treading on well-trodden ground in Beauty Pageant Land. "It's quite a high-wire act, the misfit family comedy Little Miss Sunshine," Adam B. Vary writes in the February 2, 2007 Entertainment Weekly, the annual Oscar-nominee-hagiography issue. "The Pollyanna papa, the pragmatic mama, the gay uncle, the disaffected teenager, the horny grandfather, the adorable little girl with a dream--all on a road trip, in a beaten-down VW bus, with a dead body in the trunk, heading to the deeply creepy world of prepubescent beauty pageants. It just about screams 'sitcom.'" That it does. The thing is, Little Miss Sunshine isn't even funny enough to pass muster as a sitcom. It just coincidentally happens to star Steve Carell, who also stars in the sitcom The Office, which in any given episode is both funnier and more deeply felt than LMS, and which more sharply etches the exquisite despair of real life. Take the scene in LMS, for instance, when Carell's Frank meets his former lover in the gas station while buying porn for Arkin. The scene is played for the obvious laughs and the obvious emotions; it works because it works exactly as we expect it to. Contrast this with almost any scene between Michael Scott and Jan Levinson on The Office: the "double date" at casino night, say, or Jan admitting her feelings for Michael. The Office mines these situations for both unexpected humor and for complex emotions; the laugh and the cringe are inseparable, and though we know both are coming, it's always a surprise when they do. The Office forcibly takes laughs from the audience; try as it might (dead body + cop + gay porn), Little Miss Sunshine merely earns the laughter we give it, as a wage.
Little Miss Sunshine gives us what we expect of it, and does so briskly and competently, and that may be why it has earned so much praise. It flatters the audience by telling us things we already know: Your family can be hard to deal with, but in the end, family is all you have. Beauty pageants are creepy. Suffering is a part of life, but if you get through it, you'll be a stronger person. And, of course, the big one, the theme that's hammered hard right from the beginning: Winning isn't everything. "Winners" (i.e. the creepy pageant contestants) can be losers. "Losers" (i.e. the Hoover family) can be winners. The film climaxes with the entire Hoover family joining little Olive on stage to dance to "Super Freak" and show all those "winners" what winning really is, and it's about as forced and hacky an ending as one can imagine. But, as such, it is perfect. We would expect nothing more.
******
Well, that was certainly rambling and poorly thought-out, but at least that bile is out of my system. For the sake of my Oscar pool chances (I won two years ago but was robbed, I tell ya robbed last year), I hope we don't get a reprise of that family dance party on Sunday night. Go The Departed, go! Woo! In case you were wondering, Children of Men was the actual Best Picture of 2006, with Brick in a respectable second place.
"At the most basic level, it is nearly impossible to dislike Little Miss Sunshine." Not true. Right here, hand raised, dislike in action even as we speak. I've had a little rant brewing on this most overrated of 2006 trifles since I finally caught it on DVD back in December, and I figured I might as well get it down on paper (or whatever) before the Oscars. If LMS wins Best Picture, it'll be the biggest triumph of feel-gooder mediocrity over, y'know, legitimately good moviemaking since...um, last year.
Okay, I will say this: Little Miss Sunshine isn't exactly bad, per se. Everybody involved seems to have put their all into it--I mean I've got no bad words to say about Alan Arkin or Steve Carell (well, I kinda do--see below), and as far as weirdly precocious child actors go, Abigail Breslin is less annoying than most. Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris made a whole lot of swell music videos before LMS, and they certainly demonstrate a lot of potential in their feature debut. I liked the Devotchka song "How It Ends" before I saw the movie, and it was nice to hear it in various permutations throughout the film. There is a lot to like about Little Miss Sunshine.
But all these talented people are bringing their considerable gifts to bear in service to a story that, in the end, says very little we don't already know. The real-life story of the ordeals writer Michael Arndt went through to bring his story to the screen, and his eventual success (WGA award, an almost certain Best Screenplay Oscar, deal to write Toy Story 3, etc.), are the kinds of things that make you feel warm and fuzzy about Making It in Hollywood, and make people like me a little jealous (full disclosure). It's a movie about the little guys, made by the little guys, and that's the kind of thing you want to get behind. But get behind it I shan't. The script is a mess, an odd mix of broad comedy and emotional heaviness that never gels into anything coherent. It's possible to strike this balance and make it work--see for instance Wes Anderson's Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums (yeah, I know I'm a fanboy, but that doesn't mean it's not true--and even he couldn't quite pull it off in The Life Aquatic, though his cowriter Noah Baumbach did in his own The Squid and the Whale). The characters are all broadly drawn types--suicidal gay intellectual, winning-obsessed striver, randy grampa, etc.--and it's only through the excellent work of the actors that they become anything resembling real people. And that would be fine, except LMS isn't trying to be a broad comedy, it's trying to be an insightful portrait of the American family (and, by extension, America). The melancholy yet driving "How It Ends" underscores nearly the entire movie--that ain't comedy music. That's Quirky Indie Drama music. The music is being used to take the audience to a place emotionally that the story can't--and hey, you know, that's filmmaking, but it's also a bit of a cheat. The broadness of the characters and the contrived situations prevent the drama from having as much impact as intended. The family's decision to all take the little yellow van to the beauty pageant is so contrived it reminded me of Lloyd and Harry deciding to go on their road trip in Dumb & Dumber. (Speaking of which, LMS also borrows a scooter gag from D&D, with diminishing returns.) And again, that would be fine for a goofy comedy, but that's not the tone LMS is aiming for. If it was, it would have to be funnier.
The humor in Little Miss Sunshine is, with few exceptions (most involving Arkin), supremely lazy: the repetition of "Did I ever tell you I'm America's number one Proust scholar," which wasn't that funny the first time; the use of the chicken bucket and (specifically, strangely) Sprite as condescending shorthand for This Is What Has Become of the Modern Family; the treading on well-trodden ground in Beauty Pageant Land. "It's quite a high-wire act, the misfit family comedy Little Miss Sunshine," Adam B. Vary writes in the February 2, 2007 Entertainment Weekly, the annual Oscar-nominee-hagiography issue. "The Pollyanna papa, the pragmatic mama, the gay uncle, the disaffected teenager, the horny grandfather, the adorable little girl with a dream--all on a road trip, in a beaten-down VW bus, with a dead body in the trunk, heading to the deeply creepy world of prepubescent beauty pageants. It just about screams 'sitcom.'" That it does. The thing is, Little Miss Sunshine isn't even funny enough to pass muster as a sitcom. It just coincidentally happens to star Steve Carell, who also stars in the sitcom The Office, which in any given episode is both funnier and more deeply felt than LMS, and which more sharply etches the exquisite despair of real life. Take the scene in LMS, for instance, when Carell's Frank meets his former lover in the gas station while buying porn for Arkin. The scene is played for the obvious laughs and the obvious emotions; it works because it works exactly as we expect it to. Contrast this with almost any scene between Michael Scott and Jan Levinson on The Office: the "double date" at casino night, say, or Jan admitting her feelings for Michael. The Office mines these situations for both unexpected humor and for complex emotions; the laugh and the cringe are inseparable, and though we know both are coming, it's always a surprise when they do. The Office forcibly takes laughs from the audience; try as it might (dead body + cop + gay porn), Little Miss Sunshine merely earns the laughter we give it, as a wage.
Little Miss Sunshine gives us what we expect of it, and does so briskly and competently, and that may be why it has earned so much praise. It flatters the audience by telling us things we already know: Your family can be hard to deal with, but in the end, family is all you have. Beauty pageants are creepy. Suffering is a part of life, but if you get through it, you'll be a stronger person. And, of course, the big one, the theme that's hammered hard right from the beginning: Winning isn't everything. "Winners" (i.e. the creepy pageant contestants) can be losers. "Losers" (i.e. the Hoover family) can be winners. The film climaxes with the entire Hoover family joining little Olive on stage to dance to "Super Freak" and show all those "winners" what winning really is, and it's about as forced and hacky an ending as one can imagine. But, as such, it is perfect. We would expect nothing more.
******
Well, that was certainly rambling and poorly thought-out, but at least that bile is out of my system. For the sake of my Oscar pool chances (I won two years ago but was robbed, I tell ya robbed last year), I hope we don't get a reprise of that family dance party on Sunday night. Go The Departed, go! Woo! In case you were wondering, Children of Men was the actual Best Picture of 2006, with Brick in a respectable second place.
Labels: ill-considered rants, movies, oscars, the office
