The comedy is black and I love black comedy. Yet as black as it gets it never goes too far. Just when you think it will get too ridiculous it steps back from the brink. This movie has Alan Arkin and I absolutely love Alan Arkin. His role as a cursing ("I can say what I want - I still got Nazi bullets in my ass."), drug using ("When you're old you're crazy not to do it. "), porn loving ("Get yourself a fag rag. ") grandfather serves as a great elder statesman of this disfunctional family.
What I love the most of Little Miss Sunshine is the sense of desperation. It's done with the music, the flagship "How It Ends" and its repeating droning keyboard. There are the characters, with Frank's (Steve Carell) suicide, Richard's (Greg Kinear) career, Sheryl's (Toni Collette) tired eyes. Richard's motivational philosophy is so desperately distant from his failure as a bread winner and his failure to connect with Dwayne and his "loser" talk with Olive. Even the dinner table exudes a disorganized, quickly thrown togetherness with the bucket chicken for dinner and the Sprite poored into mismatched cups. But the most prominent symbol of the desperation is the broken down, last ditch VW van. When the van fails the family has to resort to pushing it to get it started. Soon after they start to push though, they are chasing it. Two children, a recent suicide attempt and a mother, pushing and sprinting after a big yellow van, unable to stop for a moment to even board their ride lest they not get to their destination.
Great quotes from Little Miss Sunshine:
Dwayne: Divorce? Bankruptcy? Suicide? You guys are fucking losers!
Olive: Grandpa, am I pretty?
Grandpa: You are the most beautiful girl in the world.
Olive: You're just saying that.
Grandpa: No! I'm madly in love with you and it's not because of your brains or your personality.
Dwayne: I wish I could just sleep until I was eighteen and skip all this crap- high school and everything- just skip it. |