Little Miss Sunshine is my favorite road-trip movie. It’s hilarious, it’s heartfelt, and it keeps it’s script, setting and thematic focus razor tight. The movie is perfectly cast as listed below:
- Greg Kinnear plays Richard. He is a bankrupt self-help guru and is completely disillusioned with the prospect of selling his 9-steps-to-success program to a nationwide publishing house. He forces his self-help theories ad nauseum to his daugher, Olive, and step-son Dwayne.
- Toni Collette plays Sheryl, wife of Richard and the mother of the two children, who is overburdened with attempting to keep the family together. She is the glue that holds her suicidal brother, nihilist son, raunchy father-in-law, type-A husband and doe-eyed daughter together.
- Steve Carell is the suicidal brother, Frank, a professor and foremost authority on French author Marcel Proust. He fails a suicide attempt at the beginning of the movie after being rebuffed by his love interest, a graduate student who falls for his academic rival.
- Paul Dano plays the 15 year old, Nietzsche-obsessed and nihilistic, Dwayne. He has taken a vow of silence until he is accepted into the Air Force Academy.
He. Hates. Everything. - Abigail Breslen is Olive, a 7 year old who is obsessed with beauty pageants. She is the runner-up in a regional ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ child beauty pageant contest at the beginning of the movie. Olive’s love for her family and her innocence is the force that keeps the family pushing through all the hard times they encounter.
- Alan Arkin delivers a hilarious performance as the Grandpa. He is a raunchy old man who loves his drug use, smut rags and his family. Despite his shortcoming, he supports each of the characters in his own odd style. His bond with Olive is especially close, he coaches her on her pageant routine.
Olive wins her regional Little Miss Sunshine contest in Albuquerque after the winner is disqualified (for using diet pills) and the entire family loads up in a beat down Volkswagen Bus to cross three state lines to California for Nationals. They deal with repeated inconveniences and tragedy on the road, such as having to push the Bus to get it started after burning out the clutch, Frank running into his graduate student in Arizona, and Richard coming to terms with the fact that nobody wants his self-help guide.
With support from each other, every member of the family is forced to accept their own failures into their identity. The most obvious example is Richard’s transition from a Winner or Loser mentality to a Winning for Trying mentality. At the start of the film he chides Olive for eating ice cream while preparing for a beauty pageant and tells her not to enter unless she is absolutely positive she could win. By the end of the film, he couldn’t care if Olive wins nationals or not, and supports her either way.
Each character has personal growth over the course of the film. The movie ends at the horrorshow of a child beauty pageant (Olive’s routine here is seriously so funny – definitely taught to her by her raunchy grandpa). Each of the characters are farther from their goals, but have new perspective and ability to come to terms with it. Nobody has what they want, but they have what they need.
In today’s popcorn-laden cinemaverse, it’s refreshing to watch a movie that has a simple, well-executed script. Each character feels alive and has something to do. The banter between the cast is top notch. The screenwriter Michael Ardnt went on to write Toy Story 3, which I adore, and Star Wars 7 among other big budget flicks. I’d love to see him drop back down to this indie-style cinema script writing again, I think this sort of movie is what stands the test of time.
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