Little Miss Sunshine (2006) Review
8/10
A seven-year-old qualifies for a pageant in Redondo Beach by default. The family can’t afford to fly, so they take a 1971 bus with a broken clutch that has to be push-started every time it stops. That means all six of them must get out and run.
The 8 is for a comedy built entirely on failure, in which nobody succeeds at anything and the film refuses to pretend otherwise. The father’s program doesn’t sell, the brother’s ambition is medically impossible, the uncle isn’t going back, and the grandfather dies in a motel.
I laugh hard at this movie, and what I like most is how mean it’s willing to be about its own people while staying on their side. Every one of them is a loser by the father’s own definition, and the film loves them anyway without once pretending they’ve turned into winners.
What keeps it from higher is a certain neatness. Each character is assigned one crisis, each crisis arrives on schedule, and the construction is visible if you’re looking for it.
The Bus Is the Structure
The clutch breaks in the first act and nobody ever repairs it. From that point everybody has to push to start the vehicle. That means every departure is a group effort and nobody can leave alone.
That’s among the most efficient devices in any road film. It’s funny the first time, it’s funny the fifth time, and by the end it’s the whole thesis rendered as an action these people perform together. It also solves a structural problem the genre always has. Six people in a vehicle need a reason not to separate when they fall out, and a bus that requires all of them to move is that reason.
The horn breaks later and won’t stop, so the family arrives everywhere announced by a continuous noise they can’t control. That’s the second best joke in the film and it’s doing the same work.
A physical constraint that forces cooperation is worth more than any amount of dialogue about a family staying together. The bus makes the theme a thing they do instead of a thing they say.
Look for the object that can’t be fixed. A vehicle, a house, a debt or an arrangement that requires everybody to participate converts your theme into a recurring action with comic and emotional value. The test is whether the device still pays on its fourth appearance. If it’s only funny once, it’s a gag. If it deepens each time, it’s structure.
Everybody Is Losing
Richard has a nine-step program about winners and losers that nobody wants to buy. Dwayne has taken a vow of silence and intends to fly jets. Frank has attempted suicide after being left by a student. Sheryl is holding all of it together on no sleep.
The film gives each of them a specific, undignified failure instead of a general sadness, and the specificity is why it works.
Richard’s is a contract falling through on a phone call in a car park. Dwayne’s is a color-blindness test administered by his sister with a crayon. Sheryl’s is a bucket of fried chicken presented as dinner to a house full of people who didn’t ask for it and who then sit down and eat the whole thing without one single word of complaint from anybody.
The color-blindness test is the scene that hurts most. Dwayne learns in about eight seconds that the thing he’s organized his entire adolescence around is impossible, breaks his silence to scream at his family, and runs down an embankment. It starts as a laugh and turns into a wince so fast I’m never ready for it.
What follows is the film’s real position. Olive walks down after him, says nothing, and puts a hand on his shoulder. He comes back. Nobody discusses it and the bus is push-started again.
Paul Dano spends most of the film without dialogue, which is a considerable ask of a young actor, and the scream when it comes is the only moment in the picture where somebody says exactly what they mean. Everything else in the family is managed, deflected or shouted about at the wrong target.
The Grandfather
Alan Arkin plays a man thrown out of a retirement home for heroin use, who advises his teenage grandson about women in terms that would be actionable, and who’s the only person who takes Olive seriously.
The performance won the Academy Award and the reason is the contrast. Everything he says is obscene and everything he does for his granddaughter is tender, and the film never once has a character remark on it.
Arkin is the reason I’d sit through this again. He gets the filthiest lines in the script and delivers them like a man ordering lunch, and then he turns around and treats his granddaughter’s routine like the most important thing in the world.
He dies at the midpoint, in a motel, offscreen, and the film handles it as an administrative problem. The family can’t wait for the paperwork, so they remove the body from the hospital through a window and drive on with it in the back. That sequence is the film’s nerve. It’s funny, the corpse is in the bus for the entire third act, and nobody is permitted a scene about grief until much later. That’s how it really goes.
The detail that sells it is the pageant paperwork. They arrive late, the registration desk has closed, and the argument about whether Olive can still enter happens while her grandfather is in the back of the vehicle outside. The film never cuts away to point out the juxtaposition. Smart restraint. It trusts me to see it.
A character who’s obscene and tender at once, with no scene explaining the contradiction, reads as a person. The explanation turns them into a device.
Handling a death as logistics is far stronger than handling it as an occasion. The family has a deadline, a body and a form to sign, and the practical problem carries more feeling than mourning would.
Withhold the grief scene. If the reader is waiting for somebody to break down and it keeps not happening, every later scene feels it.
The Pageant Is a Horror Film
The last twenty minutes take place among children in spray tan and false teeth, choreographed by adults, competing at being adult women, and the film shoots it without commentary.
That restraint is the correct choice. No character delivers a speech about what is wrong with this. The camera simply looks at the other contestants, and the audience arrives at the conclusion without assistance.
Olive is entirely unsuited to it, which everybody in the family has known for two days and nobody has said. The tension of the final act is whether anyone will tell her, and the answer is that Frank and Dwayne decide not to.
Her routine is the film’s punchline and its argument. It’s obscene, it’s the grandfather’s choreography, it’s the wrong thing in the wrong room, and her family gets up on stage and joins her instead of letting her be humiliated on her own. That routine is the moment I’d rate the film on. I’m laughing and wincing at once, and when the family climbs up there with her I get a lump in my throat I didn’t ask for.
Abigail Breslin was ten and the performance is why the film holds. Olive is a normal child who wants to do a thing and has no idea she’s unsuited to it. That’s what makes the last twenty minutes unbearable.
Why It Held Up
Eight million dollars, around a hundred million worldwide, Academy Awards for Arkin and for Michael Arndt’s screenplay, and a permanent place in the small comedy canon. The reason it lasts is that it never converts. Richard doesn’t learn to be a better man and get his contract. Dwayne doesn’t find a new dream. The pageant isn’t won. Nothing is fixed.
Michael Arndt wrote it as a spec script after years of failing to sell anything, and the nine-step program about winners and losers is a joke written by somebody who had spent a long time on the wrong side of that distinction.
What changes is only what they’re willing to do in front of each other. That’s a much smaller and more believable transformation than the genre usually offers.
The final image is the family pushing the bus down a road together. That’s the same action they performed in the first act, meaning something different because of what has happened in between. Steve Carell is the other quiet achievement. He made this in the same period as the work that made him famous for broad comedy, and he plays Frank almost entirely still, with the wit turned down to nothing, and he’s the only person in the film who’s kind to Dwayne without wanting anything back for it.
An ending that repeats an earlier action, with the meaning changed by everything since, is the most satisfying structure available and the cheapest to build. Plant the action early and do nothing clever with it.
Resist the conversion. A comedy where the characters solve their problems is a lesser film than one where they stop pretending the problems can be solved.
The measure of change should be behavior instead of circumstance. Nothing in these people’s lives improves, and every one of them does something at the end they couldn’t have done at the start.
Should you watch Little Miss Sunshine?
Yes, and it’s funnier than its reputation suggests.
I’d go higher than an 8 if I couldn’t see the gears: every character gets exactly one crisis, and each one arrives right on schedule. That neatness looks worse on reflection than while I’m laughing, and the laughing wins. Six people failing at once, a bus that won’t start without all of them, and the same push down a different road at the end make it a comedy I think will still be funny in thirty years.
