The Irony of Desire
By Eric Cox

Little Miss Sunshine

Released by Fox Searchlight Pictures

Rated R for language, some sex and drug content

 

Irony is the dominant cultural mode of the age, and the rise of the quirky, small-budget comedy is its cinematic manifestation. A few examples of that new genre include Flirting with Disaster (1996), Slums of Beverly Hills (1998), Election (1999), Office Space (1999), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), About Schmidt (2002), and any recent movie starring Bill Murray.

 

The new film Little Miss Sunshine definitely belongs in that category, but beneath its irony lies a serious purpose that makes it the most impressive, and funny, satire of contemporary American life in many years.

 

The film focuses on the Hoovers, a dysfunctional middle-class family traveling cross-country in a beat-up Volkswagen van in order to enter nine-year-old Olive in the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant.

 

This is not exactly terra incognita. From the Vacation films to Married with Children, The Simpsons, The Family Guy, ad infinitum, the American nuclear family has been fodder for a cheap laugh.

 

And like the familiar stereotypes in those and other Hollywood products, the Hoovers are depicted as basically neurotic people trapped in a vast cultural wasteland: a universe of strip malls, television, fast food, department-store wardrobes, etc.

 

What sets the Hoovers apart, however, is that they are earnestly searching for a better life, and their various philosophies of what that might mean brilliantly capture the cultural zeitgeist.

 

The paterfamilias is Richard (Greg Kinnear), a small-time motivational speaker who divides the world into two types of people: “winners” and “losers.” With all the confidence in the world that he belongs in the former category (considerable evidence to the contrary), he has risked the family’s savings in a gambit to publish a nine-step program he’s developed.

 

Richard’s father (Alan Arkin), who has moved in with the Hoovers since being kicked out of his retirement home, is the resident hedonist. Believing that old age isn’t worth living unless you abandon yourself to debauchery, he is a lovable, foul-mouthed, libidinous heroin addict.

 

Richard’s sullen teenaged son, Dwayne (Paul Dano), takes the normal incommunicativeness of his cohort to extremes. An ardent devotee of Friedrich Nietzsche, Dwayne believes his family and everything around him to be mediocre, and has adopted a vow of silence and a Spartan lifestyle until he achieves his goal of winning acceptance to the Air Force Academy.

 

Olive (Abigail Breslin), who is as naïve and precocious as Shirley Temple, has recently been exposed to the world of prepubescent beauty pageants, and ardently desires to be as perfect as Miss America, whom she is training to emulate.

 

Uncle Frank (Steve Carell), who happens to be the nation’s leading Marcel Proust scholar, has come to stay with the Hoovers after being released from a mental hospital, where he was interned after a failed suicide attempt brought on by his unrequited love for a male graduate student.

 

Holding the bizarre clan together is Sheryl (Toni Collette), an exceedingly patient wife, mother, sibling, and daughter-in-law. While supportive of her husband and children’s dreams, she is also extremely anxious that their futures won’t work out the way any of them has it pictured.

 

The Hoovers aren’t meant to be a genuine representation of life in America—neither is the film interested in mocking the bourgeois American family. On the contrary, Little Miss Sunshine targets the notoriety- and sex-obsessed culture that tells the Hoovers they are all, to use Richard’s vocabulary, “losers.”

 

They aren’t rich, famous, or attractive. They haven’t broken the law or done anything else worth being interviewed on television about. They’re normal. Average. Unexceptional.

 

Even Frank, the nation’s leading Proust scholar, is upstaged by his arch-rival, Larry Sugarman (Gordon Thomson)—the nation’s second-leading Proust scholar—whose book on the acclaimed but little-read French novelist becomes a New York Times bestseller and enables Sugarman to buy a new sports car.

 

In that single subplot, the movie manages simultaneously to satirize the dumbing-down of high culture, the obsession with conspicuous consumption, and the intellectual pretensions of the American upper-middle class.

 

Similarly, in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant—which itself suggests the superficial competition implied by the American preoccupation with “keeping up with the Joneses”—the movie parodies the sick sexification of children brought to light a few years back by the lurid murder of JonBenet Ramsey.

 

You might think it’s impossible to exaggerate the grotesqueness of that phenomenon, even for purposes of ridicule, but the film’s raucous climactic scene manages to do it in a way that is both shocking and hilarious.

 

Screenwriter Michael Arndt’s first-rate script takes its time to establish its eccentric characters and make them believable. In fact, for the first hour or so, the movie is less a comedy than a carefully observed character study. But Arndt’s leisurely pace and attention to detail pay off as they slowly give way to a manic sprint to the movie’s satisfying finish.

 

He gets more comic mileage out of the scenes in that yellow VW van than one would have thought possible. In fact, the van becomes a metaphor for the family itself: It might not be perfect, but it keeps these flawed individuals together, and protects them from the crazed and dangerous outside world.

 

Be forewarned: Arndt pulls no punches—his script contains as much vulgarity as you’re likely to see on cable television. But that is part of the point. He drags the hapless Hoovers through all the sleaze that American popular culture offers in order to remind them, and us, that there is more to life than status-climbing and instant gratification.

 

 

Eric Cox is a movie columnist for The American Enterprise Online.