Little Miss Sunshine was recommended to me by the most cynical man I have ever met. He said it wasn’t his kind of film but that he had, despite his grim black cynical heart, really enjoyed it. The features a dysfunctional family’s roadtrip from Alburqurque to Redondo Beach for their daughter’s garish beauty pageant and is, undoubtedly, one of the sharpest films I’ve seen in years.
All too often cinema is populated by ciphers and cliches. Writers rarely understand what it is that make people who they are, preferring to show what other people think other people are like. Little Miss Sunshine sees the world with incredible clairty, focus and joie de vivre. It sees the world like I do.
There’s the gay Proust scholar brother who has come to stay with the family after attempting suicide. There’s the pseudo self-help guru father who needs a lot of help if he is going to get his facile 9 steps book published. There’s the wiseacre grandad who enjoys heroin and porn. And there’s the silent Nietzschean adolescent played by Paul Dano (recently seen opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in There will be Blood) who has undertaken a vow of silence until he passes his pilot’s exam. All of these characters could have been drawn directly from my brain and to see them embodied on screen was distinctly uncanny.
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