Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with spy Cappy Capulet who has seen the new flick from Steve Carrell called LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, which was an indie flick that hit it big at Sundance. I'm really looking forward to this one, I gotta tell ya'. Not only do you have Carrell, but you also have Greg Kinnear and Alan Arkin in the mix. The below review is a bit conflicted, but still calls the film one of the funniest of the year. I have a feeling that this film might play a bit like SUPERTROOPERS where most people will find some of it funny, but disjointed and others are along for the whole ride. Or not. I won't know for sure until I see the thing myself, but that's the impression I got from this review. Enjoy, it's fairly light on the spoilers!
Hi guys,
Cappy Capulet here, author of a fairly awful, spoiler-heavy review of AvP that you guys printed a few years back. I got a chance to see Fox Searchlight's new comedy LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE tonight at the AMC Fenway in Boston, and hopefully the following review of said film'll make up for the last one.
I'll say this first - I liked this movie. It was most certainly the funniest I've seen this year, and the first I've seen in a very long time that had the entire (packed) audience genuinely and consistently laughing. I'd even strongly recommend it to just about anyone over the age of 15 or so. That I considered it slightly disappointing has more to do with my expectations, I suppose, than the film itself.
The basic story: a kooky family takes a cross-country trip in order to enter their little daughter into a beauty pageant (said pageant being named, you guessed it, "Little Miss Sunshine"). Of course, they hit various obstacles along the way. Greg Kinnear plays the father, a bottom-of-the-rung self-help guru who actually leads his life by his own "9-step program." Toni Collette plays his wife, which pretty adequately sums up her character. Alan Arkin plays Kinnear's father, who's recently been kicked out of his retirement home for snorting heroin. Paul Dano is the son, who's taken a 9-month vow of silence and communicates by writing on a pad of paper, and Abigail Breslin plays the daughter. Steve Carell rounds out the cast as Toni Collette's brother, a gay Proust scholar who's recently tried to commit suicide. If this group sounds a bit unrealistically eclectic, it's because they are.
The good: almost every set piece in the film is a success. Most of what came out of Alan Arkin's mouth was laugh-worthy, as were the majority of Dano's notes. The various failures of the family's VW Bus are a running theme, and, while they're just a tiny bit overused, are pretty damned funny. The beauty pageant portion of the movie is particularly good, in a very, very creepy kind of way. I laughed through most of it, but it was a bit terrifying to have a peek into the weird kiddie pageant world of insane parents and sexualized little girls (think JonBenet). I should also mention that Abigail Breslin puts in one of the better little-kid performances I've seen in a while. Her character feels very natural, a feat so few child actors seem to accomplish.
The bad: while the aforementioned set pieces are all very nice, they all feel a bit disjointed. It felt as though strength of story was sacrificed in a lot of places for humor. Also, some of the characters, Kinnear's and Collette's in particular, seem to change from scene to scene in order to fit into whatever joke is in the works. Kinnear can't quite pull off the there-are-winners-and-there-are-losers thing (his shtick reminded me at times of the "sharks vs. sheep" speech from Futurama), and by the end of the movie seems to have given it up entirely. This is partly due to a blow this aspect of him is dealt about halfway through, but it still seems a bit out of whack. Collette's character varies pretty seriously throughout the movie, and while this is also partly due to some plot points, she's by far the least memorable of the group. The worst offender is probably the ending (you'll know it when you see it), which starts off very well but descends into sheer cornball territory.
The "meh": Steve Carrell, whom I love, doesn't do a bad job, but he doesn't exactly astound either. His character is a college professor, but he never quite feels that way - in fact, he's so much like Michael Scott at times that I wondered if that wasn't exactly what the filmmakers asked of him. Paul Dano is decidedly better as a mute than he is once he starts to talk. Also, I rather liked the score, by a group called Devotchka, but it seemed slightly inappropriate at times. Not ALONE IN THE DARK sex scene inappropriate, but inappropriate nonetheless.
In the end LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE left me, for lack of a better word, conflicted. The movie's got a lot of weak spots that made the critic in me shake his head, but nearly every one of them is countered by the fact that it all manages to be legitimately funny. My main problem with it is that it tries in a lot of ways to be SIDEWAYS and fails in most of them. And yet, I laughed out loud a whole lot more often here than I did during that film. It's clearly striving to be an "indie" comedy, but ends up having a bit too much "regular" comedy thrown in. (I suppose I'd define "regular" comedy as relying on 'jokes' and "indie" comedy, well, not doing that so much.) Still, I heartily suggest that people see it. I just don't think there'll be any Oscar nods come January.
Cappy Capulet...away!
