Life Is But a Dream

Waiting game: Richard (Greg Kinnear), Frank (Steve Carell), Dwayne (Paul Dano), Sheryl (Toni Collette) and Olive (Abigail Breslin) pass the time in Little Miss Sunshine. Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox.

Olive (Abigail Breslin), hub of the redemptive road comedy Little Miss Sunshine, is well-named: she is a series of circle shapes, a round body with round glasses balanced on a round nose. She is also seven, so this look is adorable instead of tragic. But tragedy persists, quiet and dull and everywhere in Olive’s worn Albuquerque home, where each drinking glass sports a different fast-food cartoon character. Her father, Richard (Greg Kinnear), is a failed motivational speaker who hates failures; her uncle Frank (Steve Carell) is a suicidal Proust expert; and her brother is a Nietzsche-obsessed teen experimenting with muteness — and that’s only half the Hoover family, making little Olive the sanest, happiest Hoover in Hooverville.

The child star’s supreme sweetness and the checklist of idiosyncrasies that define her family bode badly for this much-heralded Sundance hit. Pinning adults’ redemptions to a smoochable child is just too easy (Jerry Maguire); for those of us without souls, cute-kid movies feel like being force-fed a thousand litres of emotion-in-a-bottle.

But Little Miss Sunshine mostly knows better. Married directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris — who come from music videos and famously used a Nick Drake song in that VW commercial — neatly sidestep the precious/precocious/pernicious kid trap by asking little of their star except natural childishness. Breslin is no trained monkey, and sometimes she isn’t even cute. When Olive expresses her desire to compete in the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant in Redondo Beach, Calif. — by screaming like her finger has been caught in a door — she is at once lovable, sad and totally realistic. Led by her exhausted mother, Sheryl (Toni Collette), the whole wacky clan hits the road in a decrepit yellow VW van that only starts in third gear.

Despite its superficial modesty, Little Miss Sunshine is a film that seriously mocks the American Dream, which makes it oddly subversive when it’s not being sitcom-quirky. Self-made (and nearly bankrupt) Richard delivers a nine-step program at what looks like The Learning Annex, lecturing a sparse audience on his philosophy of life: “There are two kinds of people: winners and losers.” He then returns to his house, where Sheryl is just barely holding things together, slamming down on the table a giant bucket of take-out chicken that passes for dinner — again. When is upward mobility, the desire for individual greatness — the defining feature of an entire nation — a noble attribute, and when is it simply delusion?

Rolling stop: Olive (Abigail Breslin), Frank (Steve Carell) and Sheryl (Toni Collette) exit the family van. Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox.

But the delusions that sustain the Hoovers aren’t pathetic; the cast rises above the writing and plays the caricatures as full-flesh humans. While it’s frequently funny, there’s little hamminess in Little Miss Sunshine, and no American Beauty-style savaging of ordinary people’s flaws. Dwayne (Paul Dano), Olive’s teenaged brother, dreams of becoming a pilot, and in tribute to Nietzsche, he has taken a vow of silence until he reaches his goal. As everyone who has watched politics closely can attest, the push to greatness is a very good place to hide fear and misanthropy. “I hate everyone,” Dwayne scrawls on a piece of paper to his uncle.

Uncle Frank nods knowingly, his own dreams smoking behind him after the loss of a MacArthur Genius Grant to America’s No. 2 Proust scholar, who also happens to be the man who took his boyfriend. And the No. 1 Proust scholar? “That would be me,” Frank deadpans. In other films, Carell gives meaningful glimpses of his wounds even when he’s being hilarious, but this is the first time he drops the comic crutches almost entirely. He is quite moving in his desperation, closely observing the fighting of his family through scooped-out eye sockets, his razored wrists still wrapped in gauze.

Frank’s transformation is inevitable, of course, according to the laws of indie movie schematics; there’s so much transformation in Little Miss Sunshine that even the van is totally different by the end. Frank realizes it’s OK to eschew professional public accolades for the private greatness of being a good person within this strange family; in other words, screw the Dream, I’m into community. He looks at his sister scarfing down a popsicle with the edginess of a mother who needs a bloody break, and his face is filled with subdued love.

She giggles and instinctively sides with her big brother as her family bickers in the car; the quiet play between these grown siblings is one of the film’s more subtle delights. Collette is well-cast as Olive’s mom because she, too, never monkeys around; her plainness sometimes turns into real beauty, which is something that only people who don’t play to the camera can pull off.

All of these Hoovers circle Olive while she spins joyfully in her own orbit. They seem almost hungry for her dream — not the part that’s about winning, but the part that takes such great pleasure in merely existing. Olive’s main ally is her grandfather (Alan Arkin), who is the pursuit of happiness gone wrong. Kicked out of a nursing home, he snorts heroin, loves porn and swears more than he breathes. He is also the most tiresome, faux-shocking creation on the bus.

The crew arrives in California, a new frontier, to find that the pageant is a freak show of semi-pornographic dancing girls — literally girls — with hairlines shaved to resemble dolls come to life. Before the pageant, Richard asks Olive: “There’s no sense in entering a contest if you don’t think you’re going to win. Do you think you can win?” As Richard sits in the audience watching the end result of this great victory pursuit, Kinnear is at his best, jaw slackening as his own bad judgment blooms in front of his eyes.

But while little Olive dances on the stage, oblivious to her complicity — and inadvertently, heartbreakingly, the most pornographic of them all — she is the expression of all the possibility of the entire Hoover family. She is spiralling and defective, fully alive, singing her American loserdom to the skies.

Little Miss Sunshine opens Aug.4 across Canada.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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