Movie Natters: August 3, 2006 Archive

Dysfunction Junction

Posted at 12:53 PM on August 3, 2006 by Euan Kerr (2 Comments)

So often nowadays vehicles become more than mere transportation. A car can be an office, a living room, or a dressing room. A place to sleep, a place to make love, or a place to foment revolution.

In "Little Miss Sunshine" the Hoover family finds its VW bus is a mobile prison, carrying each member away, or perhaps toward, their great and diverse passions. Given that the Hoovers are an immensely dysfunctional group, the resulting satire is humanly (as opposed to humanely) amusing.

Co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris set the family on a road-trip from Albuquerque to Los Angeles so the youngest member of the party Olive, can compete in a beauty pageant. None of them really want to go.

Olive's parents Richard and Sheryl (Greg Kinnear and Toni Collette) are desperately hoping an agent can sell Richard's self-help system and make the family solvent. Their teenage son Dwayne (Paul Dano) has taken a vow of silence, and Richard's foul-mouthed father has been kicked out of his retirement community after being caught snorting heroin. And then there's Sheryl's brother Frank, (Steve Carell) a Proust scholar who recently attempted suicide after an unsuccessful gay romance (although as he points out at length, it wasn't really that which made him want to kill himself.)

On the surface none of them seem to really care for one another, but are going through the motions so they can get back to their real interests.

It's a manic mixture of desperation and frustration, encased in a malfunctioning bus, and it's very entertaining. All the performers acquit themselves well, with Alan Arkin's manic rage and Steve Carell's buttoned-down misery leading the pack.

While it's never really in doubt that the Hoovers will make it through, and there is all the usual stuff about the importance of family. What makes "Little Miss Sunshine" so intriguing is the question of how they'll do it, even as they make increasingly curious decisions and have to live with the consequences.

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