Sunshine State

I had intended to watch Half Nelson today. But, must like United 93, the filmmakers decided that a handheld treatment would provide that queasy immediacy. A little too queasy for me. So I left after about ten minutes.

That left me wondering what to do next. I thought about getting my money back or watching another film. I opted for the second. I decided on Little Miss Sunshine, a title I would have ordinarily skipped because, well, with a title like that. But, a former coworker had recommended it, and I didn't have much to do at the time.

I had expected, since the recommendation came from a new parent, that it might be something heartwarming about a little kid.

And while it was somewhat heartwarming, it's not a film you'd see with your kid.

This film tackles a much bigger theme than what it seem on the surface, which is dealing with a dysfunctional family's journey to have their daughter entered in a beauty pageant for little kids.

By the way, is there a more maligned profession in movies than beauty pageants? Surely, the competition must be filled with vacuous eight year old kids. But, wait, they are eight years old.

For some odd reason, this reminded me of a film I had seen with Justin a while back called Smile, which dealt with the adult pageants. It took a more serious stance about the people who are into pageants, the former beauty queen whose yearly highlight is managing a beauty contest. It's important to her, if not to her husband.

Indeed, the beauty contest almost seems secondary to this film, which is about ambition. How many of our lives are filled with the desire to be the best? Look at advice on how to get a good job, and it's all about selling yourself. I find it interesting how employer-centric many articles are seeking to find the best talent, and trying to root out the ineffective. What if you happen to be the ineffective one? What do you do with your life?

Admittedly, this being something of a comedy, situations feel exaggerated for effect. Greg Kinnear plays a father whose trying to make money based on a nine step program. The power of positive thinking. What winners think. What losers think. How to be a winner. His is the purest in terms of "ambition", in that he believes success derives from positive thought.

The daughter wants to be a beauty queen. The grandfather regrets his life, feeling he never strived for anything. He trains his granddaughter in her dance routine. The son, a goth-ish type who reads Nietzche and seems anti-establishment, has taken a vow of silence, until he can become an Air Force pilot, even if his credentials don't exactly fit the military type. Steve Carrell plays the mother's brother, a gay professor who tried to kill himself when he finds a rival Proust scholar not only dates his ex boyfriend, a vacuous grad student, but has been given a genius fellowship as the premier Proust scholar.

The mother, strangely enough, has no ambitions of her own. She doesn't exactly live precariously through her kids nor her husband, but seems to be the only sensible person in the family, despite serving family dinners of take-out chicken on paper plates with Sprite on the side.

It's true the film underlines the point when the son, who finally speaks, says "All our lives is one beauty contest after another", and this makes you wonder what will happen to the beauty contest. If the little girl wins, it seems to be like those anti-war films that have glamourous war footage. If she loses and is humiliated, it would be a bit too much pathos for this film. What happens seems just about right, and in the end, the film's message is simple. No matter how dysfunctional a family is, they're still family.

Think of this as a darker, less sacchrine version of Parenthood.

The acting is overall quite good. Greg Kinnear is somewhat on autopilot, since he's playing a role that he seems to have played a lot, but he does invest some emotional core for a man who otherwise appears to have a meaningless life as a motivator. Alan Arkin is good as the acerbic grandpa, who likes porn, but seems to care for his granddaughter's dance lessons.

Steve Carrell does, as so many comedians do well, play a semi-serious role as the brother who finds something to be happy about after an attempted suicide. I didn't recognize Paul Dano, whose grown quite a bit since his lead role with Brian Cox in L.I.E.. He's also good for a guy who doesn't have lines until most of the way through the film.

You can tell, with one small bit, that the film, despite its quirks, wants to keep to a weirdly consistent logic. In particular, the VW van that only starts in 3rd gear, must be pushed to 10-15 mph, is repeatedly pushed to start, and while that ought to be humorous, or at the very least, repetitive, it made me think that the screenwriter didn't get so lazy as to offer a simple solution for this problem they created.

So even as it perhaps exaggerated the faults, it avoids making everyone into stereotypes, and even downplays some of the beauty pageant (for example, the rival parents are not at all mentioned, with the former beauty queen as judge being their stand-in).

Good, better than expected, if not quite great.