The Ottery
“If an otter can’t have fun doing something, it just simply won’t do it.”

We All Live in a Yellow Minivan, a Yellow Minivan . . .

January 20th, 2007

I finally saw Little Miss Sunshine! I happened to be in Turkey and Egypt when it was playing in my town, so I’ve had to wait until DVD to enjoy the mayhem—and enjoyable mayhem it is.

Most of the people who have recommended the movie to me have been through therapy. And that actually makes me trust their opinion of the movie’s portrayal of human experience more. The Hoovers’ trip from New Mexico to southern California certainly concentrates disasters: within the trip, we get to see how each character reacts to devastating failure. The pile-up of “oh no, this can’t be happening” moments, if a little exaggerated, by that very exaggeration gives us something that we can identify with. Who hasn’t had a series of debacles that makes you finally shake your fist at the sky and yell, “This isn’t funny, God!”?

But of course it is funny when we get to watch movie characters go through it. I won’t give away many of the details of Little Miss Sunshine’s plot here, because that would definitely spoil part of the effect. But all the twists and turns along the road are wacky and rewarding.

I particularly enjoyed seeing Steve Carell’s portrayal of the nation’s preeminent (and also gay and suicidal) Proust scholar. I’ve always thought Carell had a lot of acting versatility: his characters in “The Office” and The 40-Year-Old Virgin are extremely different from each other, though both belong to a kind of comedy painted with broad strokes. Carell manages to bring nuances even to those characters, but it’s a pleasure to see him blend into the background of the ensemble (a very talented ensemble) in Little Miss Sunshine.

For a small movie directed by relative unknowns (husband and wife team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, whose only previous directing experience was with music videos), Little Miss Sunshine has done very well both at the box office and in the awards season so far, leading to its new epithet: “the little movie that could.” An article about the awards season in last week’s Entertainment Weekly points out some irony in the situation: Mark Harris writes, “This year, Fox Searchlight has done everything but trademark the color yellow in its attempt to drive the Little Miss Sunshine bus all the way to the Kodak Theatre [where the Oscars are held]. One of the season’s ripest ironies may be the company’s mammoth effort to secure prizes for a movie that makes such acute fun of the American obsession with winning.”

So it may be a little ironic, but I still want to reward the film for creating such an appealing portrait of losing. All the Academy’s acting races may be fairly predetermined this year, but there’s a chance that Little Miss Sunshine could sneak in as the fifth nominee for Best Picture (I’d like it to be nominated, but I’d still prefer that the award go to The Queen). We’ll see when the nominations are announced on Tuesday (yup, the same day as the State of the Union—hmmm, which am I more excited about?).

Entry Filed under: Movies