Little Miss Sunshine:The Most Overrated Film of the Year

As the most overrated film of the year, Little Miss Sunshine stands as the type of film that convincingly integrates the blasé congeniality of independent film/award winner with mainstream fare. Unfortunately predictable and filled with the typicality that is expected with the pseudo-critique of American families that has filled every film of this kind since "American Beauty."

While the cast is amazing and they all deliver stellar performances, which deserve a great amount of praise on both the individual and ensemble levels, it is the end result that dissolves their hard work into a messy mishmash of "all ready seen that" and "I wish that hadn't happened." Stars like Steve Carell, Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette and Alan Arkin all have very distinct, clever characters with...unfortunately, nothing to do. Arkin gets to be the crazy, heroin-sniffing Grandpa; Kinnear is given the permanently and annoyingly up-tempo dad, Collette is given the prototypical mom role and Carell is the suicidal, homosexual, scholarly uncle to the two kids. Paul Dano is the Nietzsche loving, family hating, vow of silence taking; son while Abigail Breslin is Olive, the titular Little Miss Sunshine hopeful.

With all of the creativity that went into the design of these characters, one would think they would all be given something specific to do. Something specific that might have some small relation to why they are the way they are. Instead, writer Michael Ardnt and co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Ferris, decide to give the characters a set amount of screen time to quickly resolve their issues without any additional conflict thrown in that might deepen either the character development or the film itself. It's like the film was designed as a series of individual vignettes, instead of a whole concept, which then was thrown together for nothing more than a total runtime.

For example, Carell happens to run into the student he was in love with and his new lover at a gas station hundreds of miles away from the city the love affair initially took place. And it just happens to be during the weekend he is forced into a van with his sister's family as they make an impromptu road trip to California. How wacky! The complete lack of effort that went into creating any actual meaning in this film is astonishing. Furthermore, what is it about this movie that necessitates two directors? Perhaps they were there to convince one another that this was actually a good film in the making.

As the film careens to its inevitable conclusion, it becomes overly apparent what it is all about: the triumph of the power of family over the consumptive ferocity that is a ridiculously conforming society. That's right, Little Miss Sunshine is the same film as every other movie about families with wacky members, who, in the end realize they love each other and that's all that matters; how wonderfully unoriginal.

The DVD from Fox comes in the typically horrible fashion the studio is so well known for. Since they simply can't be bothered to release separate Wide and Fullscreen editions of the disc (for those people who still insist on watching a sub-par version of the film) the film's special features are annoyingly spread out on both sides of a single disc. Those features include a commentary by the whole team and one of the songs featured in the film from Devotchka. Then, as if it's a good thing, Fox promotes the fact that there are 4 alternate endings, which means that the filmmakers had no idea how to wrap this thing up and just threw darts at a corkboard to choose the final cut. It doesn't really matter; none of them would have improved the film to any significant degree.