Little Miss Sunshine

There are a lot of bad movies in the world, a lot of extraordinarily bad movies, and I find myself being forced to write devastating attacks on only a very few of them. Watching the Academy Awards this evening (all right I'm lying; I wasn't watching the Academy Awards this evening, I never watch the Academy Awards. Outside of being strapped into a chair Clockwork Orange style I can foresee very few instances in which I end up watching the Academy Awards.) it occurred to me that the banal mediocrity of Little Miss Sunshine was one of those films deserving of such a barrage. Not because it is an exceptionally bad movie, but because it represents a new trend towards 'quirky' filmmaking. A genre identified by lazy characterizations based upon a handful of attributes utterly unrepresentative of any actual human being and plots consisting of a series of events so contrived, so painfully unrelated to anything even resembling reality, that it would shame Oscar Wilde. Assuming of course that a man who spent several years in a British prison on charges of sodomy could be shamed by crappy writing. Note to readers; spoilers follow, the biggest of which being that Little Miss Sunshine is pure feces.

Little Miss Sunshine, as I am often told by any of that tragic plurality of Americans utterly lacking in aesthetic sense, presents a family (the Hoovers) which is somehow real, which reminds them of their own in a way which most cinematic families, maudlin and preposterous, do not. This is true in so far as the family in Little Miss Sunshine is unhappy, a condition which most families throughout the world suffer from to a greater or a lesser extent. But I am reminded of Tolstoy's oft-repeated quote, that 'all happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Your family and the Hoovers may both be unhappy, but they are unhappy in a different way, as the Hoovers are a family composed of almost comically unrealistic individuals, and your family is almost certainly not.

Let us go through them, very briefly, simply to illustrate the almost inspired inaccuracy with which they are written. First, there is little Dwayne, a miserable Nietzsche-spouting wackjob who has taken a vow of silence. I know so many people who remind me of Dwayne. Except replace 'so many people' with 'no one living anywhere on the G-d damn planet.' Or take Grandpa Edwin, an elderly heroin addict. I remember, shortly before his death, my Grandfather and I taking one last trip on the H-train. Wait, no, I'm sorry, that was also a lie. There likely hasn't been a portrayal of a geriatric which bore less of a resemblance to any actual person since Marlon Brando's turn as Kal-El in the first Superman movie. The gay, suicidal Proust scholar, the color-blind self-help guru (get it? He's writes self-help books but he himself is a failure! Oh, how I drown in the delicious irony of it all!) each is more comically inhuman than the next. I have met entities whilst in the midst of hallucinogenic stupors who seemed more grounded in reality than this collection of personae. They are not people; they are a collection of exotic, unlikely attributes strung uncomfortably on the faintest thread, the barest wisp, of actual individuals.

The plot is a similar mishmash of improbabilities, each progressively more absurd and unlikely, each further straining the bounds of credulity. The family decides to take their daughter to a beauty pageant only to discover that the family van, with which they had planned on making the voyage, can only function by pushing it down a hill to a speed of fifteen or so miles an hour and then jumping in. The suggestion that the family would continue their trip, what with the inconvenience and not insignificant danger using the van entails, requires me to suspend disbelief to roughly the same extent one is required to do when watching an installment in the Star Wars sexology, except that the Star Wars sexology facilitates this suspension of disbelief by making it clear that it operates outside the bounds of conventional reality, while Little Miss Sunshine insists upon maintaining the absurd fiction that it is portraying human existence. Later in the movie the family breaks into a funeral home to rescue their dead grandfather so he can continue on the trip, an action which raises both theatrical and hygienic questions. There's more, but what's the point in continuing? The movie is utterly incoherent, virtually from beginning to end.

Little Miss Sunshine has been praised for being original, which it is, in so far as the movie is unlike anything that has been on screen before it. Unfortunately, it is also unlike anything that has ever been seen in actual life. The film reveals such an astonishing lack of understanding as to human behavior and activity that one cannot help but wonder if it was created by extra-terrestrials. I imagine a race of lizard-like people sitting around a table and punching up the script.

Lizard Creature A: ...And then the humanoid female will do a provocative dance at an inappropriate moment!

Lizard Creature B: Brilliant! That is exactly how Earth-creatures behave!

And so on. I don't suggest that Little Miss Sunshine is entirely lacking in wit or humor, but its jokes are dishonest, shlocky, slapstick. They provide no insight into the characters or into ourselves. In short, the film is mediocre in the extreme and unworthy of the honors bestowed upon it.