Recipe: Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
Ingredients:
- One sweet little rotund 7 yr old angel, with a few missing front teeth, compensated by a cherubic mile.
- One adorable, irritating grandfather filled to the brim with a devil-may-care attitude and fond of snorting heroin in the bathroom.
- One forceful, determined, im-always-right, and not to mention, blinkered, dad who is a complete flop as a motivational speaker.
- One eccentric Nietzsche lover for a brother, in the throes of the idiosyncrasies of the teenage years.
- An unemployed gay uncle having suicidal tendencies and a fondness for quoting Proust .
- And the family gluestick- a mother (who appear to be a relatively normal human being, albeit with her own flaws, one of them being chain-moking) holding the famliy together.
The Chef and his team:
Misdirectors: Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris ( of “The Cutting Edge” fame on MTV)
Scribbler: Michael Arndt (currently scribbling “Toy story 3”)
Pretenders:
Greg Kinear, Toni Collette, Alan Arkin, Abigail Breslin, Paul Dano and Steve Carrell
CAUTION: Not to be sampled by children and all finicky adults who are offended by swearing
Method of preparation
The movie begins with Olive Hoover (Abigail Breslin) who happen to win the local beauty contest and thereby enters the finals of a beauty-pagaent, “Miss Sunshine”, by fluke. Seeing the confidence and excitement aroused in Olive at the prospect of contesting in the finals, her father Richard (Greg Kinnear), whose favourite statement, ( in his own words), is, “There are 2 kinds of people in this world- there are winners and there are losers”, is keen to see his daughter sieze this oppurtunity.
Olive’s mother, Sheryl (Toni Collette) invites her brother Frank (Steve Carrell) into her family. Frank, a renowned Proust scholar, has attempted suicide following an unsuccessful romance with a male graduate student. He can’t stay at the hospital due to their insurance.
Sheryl’s teenage son from her previous marriage, Dwayne, has taken a vow of silence as a follower of Nietzsche and aims to be a jet pilot in the Navy. It’s been 9 months since he’s talked and he finds his family tormenting.
Dwayne’s grandfather Edwin was sent away from the institution for elders, “Sunset Manor” and is addicted to heroin. He has the reputation of being a no-gooder enjoying little respect from anyone in the family except Olive.
The beauty contest is to held in Redondo Beach, California and is due in a couple of days (the Hoovers stay in Albuquerque, New Mexico). The Hoovers (and Frank) can’t fly because they’re tight for cash, Richard doesn’t want to go because he has an important business proposition that could be his big break, Dwayne doesn’t want to go at all, Frank can’t stay by himself or stay behind with Dwayne, Grandpa definitely wants to go, and Sheryl can’t take her car because it won’t fit everyone. .It’s finally settled that they will drive to California in their old run-down VW bus- a Volkswagen Type 2 (Kombi).
Thus, circumstances conspire to put this motley lot together on a cross-country road trip with the goal of getting Olive to the Little Miss Sunshine contest in far off California. The first in a long run of disasters is the bus breaking down, causing them all to push it to get the trip started. There are MANY more things, however, which hinder Olive’s Little Miss Sunshine career, including a death in the family, discovery of colour blindness in another family member, a tiff with law and a life-long ban.
Taste Analysis
The Hoover family is the dictionary meaning of the word “dysfunctional”. Olive is an innocent little girl with a dream: winning the Little Miss Sunshine contest. Stirred by her pure excitement and joy, her family wants her dream to come true, but they are so burdened with their own quirks, neuroses, and problems that they can barely make it through a day without some disaster befalling them.
Richard is highly motivated but unsuccessfully trying to sell his self-help and self-improvement technique “Using nine steps to reach success”. He is constantly reminding himself and his family that he hates losers and but he is actually a complete loser himelf.
Frank is homosexual and an expert in Proust. He is driven to humiliation and depression when he is rejected by his boyfriend, loses his job and his great competitor becomes renowned and recognized as number one in the field of Proust. One gets a taste of the dark comedy in the movie when Sheryl picks up Frank at the hospital and the and the doctor tells Sheryl to watch him closely, while also informing her of hiding medication and sharp objects.
The vow of silence taken by Dwayne, allows him to escape somewhat from the family whose very presence torments him. In the early part of the movie, he writes down a note to Frank – “I hate everyone”. Frank asks if that includes his family, and Dwayne underlines “everyone”.
And Olive’s grandfather is a ne’er-do-well with a drug habit, but at least he enthusiastically coaches Olive in her contest talent routine. In fact, it is thanks to Grandpa that the movie reaches its hilarious end.
The cast is marvellous as the dyfunctional and bankrupted family. The death scene, hinted at above, is written and directed ( or rather, scribbled and misdirected) beautifully with a right balance of emotion and practicality. These emotional scenes also transform seamlessly into some of the funniest scenes in the movie.
The tender relationhip between a brother and sister is displayed beautifully in the scene in which Olive reaches out to Dwayne to comfort him, when all others fail. Few scenes are as effective as this without a single word being spoken throughout.
The final part of the movie, which deals with the actual pageant, is by far the funniest and the strongest part of the film. It illustrates, with great hilarity, the frighteningly shallow people who are involved in child pageants today. You can’t help rooting for Olive, who is refreshingly normal amongst the other contestants who are frighteningly plastic. The hilarity of the climax is the all the more pronounced due to the twist in the tale.
The movie is totally a must-see for the way in which the various family members, who could not be more different from each other, come together to ensure that Olive not only contests in the beauty pageant but also gives a booming (in more ways than one!) performance, that she so hardly practiced for. By far, the best comedy and a very good movie that I have seen in a long-long time.
Kudos to the misdirectors, scribbler and the pretenders and the rest of the chef’s crew!
A few spoilers, that are my favourites:
.. announces to her that they’re going to California. That night, Dwayne writes to Frank “please don’t kill yourself tonight” before they go to bed, and Dwayne also writes “welcome to hell”.
… Grandpa mentions that he still has Nazi bullets in his ass when Olive takes off her headphones and asks them what they’re talking about. Grandpa just says politics and she puts her headphones on again.
…
