jane dark's sugarhigh!

little miss sunshine

Little Miss Sunshine finally can't escape its fate as the feelgood movie of the summer. As the story of a clutch of struggling and troubled individuals coming together as a family — an elliptical circling of the wagon around the usual twin poles of the death of the elder and the defense of the kid's innocence, ending with the rebuilt nuclear family sacrificing pride for mutual dependence and dancing their defiance of the external world — it's exactly as limited as such a movie must be.

It must be said that it does as well within those horizons as it possibly could; it may be close to the best such feelgood flick. Its struggle not to subvert genre clichés (which itself is so often a yawn, anyway) but to make the most of them is pulled off sort of superbly; irascible grandpa's death, though played for pathos (again, rather effectively: "GO HUG MOM") turns out to be essential to the finale's unfolding. He's taught young Olive a dance, see, for her big finale in the Little Miss Sunshine competition — one which, though it's frequently rehearsed, we don't see until its actually performed.

The dance turns out to make a mockery of the pageant, and all children's beauty pageants. Here we must note that the film — which presents such pageants in all their vacuous horror, parading super-sexualized grade-schoolers who may or may not be in on the grotesquerie, and parents who clearly are — had the incredibly strange fortune to have its late-summer opening in parallel with the return of the national JonBenet Ramsey obsession, and the return of all her pageant images to the nation's television screens. In this movie, there's no doubt that the parents — any parents, at any pageant — did it; the only question is what "it" is.

The mockery of such pageants presents little challenge; the movie's stroke is to leave its status unknown and unknowable, exactly because grandpa's dead. Was that his plan, in teaching her the routine? Did he senilely believe it was a potential winner? Or was it simply the only "dance" he knew, as a crass, uneducated veteran? Any of these answers would be unsatisfying; the execution of all the possibilities to the exclusion of none is close on perfect.

The movie has that level of care at almost every level. One of its running sight gags is the famiily's need to push-start their VW microbus, done each time with much huffing and puffing and varying levels of exuberance; within the physical comedy, the film stages the family dynamics with choreographic ease in the order that each member hops into the accelerating vehicle. Again, it's an image with a limit, in that it must imagine familes as mechanisms, the separate parts working best when working together; the film's capacity to be eloquent despite such banal ideas is its nature and appeal.

Except for Steve Carrell, that is, who is appealing in and of himself; he's most engaging early in the film, when he's frozen and morose. In a very different way, he's as good with a squint as DeNiro. As his character's mobility and humor return over the course of the narrative, Carrell starts drawing from his general bag of comedy tricks, and the character loses some definition; one hopes he'll have the intelligence to take on a substantially serious role in the near future, just to see what he can do with it.

Posted by jane at September 4, 2006 09:12 PM | TrackBack