By Eric Kohn

Little Miss Sunshine

Directed by Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris

The cutesy hipster mentality that dominates movies made by music video directors is in danger of becoming a postmodern imitation of itself. The existential loopiness in the work of Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry has a rightful place in the history of obscure narratives, demonstrating how an eye for visualizing music can lead to the creation of gorgeous prose. But Jonze and Gondry’s feature films have been fleshed out by Charlie Kaufman’s substantial screenplays, which manage to play with abstraction without negating the importance of structure. Little Miss Sunshine, written and directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who also come from an MTV-fueled background, isn’t in the same league as the Kaufman collaborations, but it manages to avoid pretentiousness for other reasons. Its rocky, occasionally disjointed story has a harmless moral center that benefits from a light touch, like muzak as a short story. This is a basic dramedy, well-cast and plainly told, with an arc utterly watchable but totally passable—summer brain candy for the anti-Pirates crowd.

The conflict centers on an unsettlingly dysfunctional blue-collar family with an equally dysfunctional van en route to an elementary-age beauty pageant. Since this is middlebrow entertainment, all the usual suspects are here: The inept businessman (Greg Kinnear), his resigned, downtrodden wife (Toni Collette), their militant son (Paul Dano) and adolescent daughter (Abigail Breslin), the gay suicidal uncle (Steve Carrell) and the invective-spouting granddad (Alan Arkin). The script pretends to be dark and cynical, but even when a major character dies rather suddenly in the middle of the second act, the movie retains an almost unsettling amount of cuddliness, like “Barney” meets Very Bad Things. 

This doesn’t have anything to do with Dayton and Faris’ rather straightforward direction; it appears to stem from slightly misguided casting. Carrell is obviously the most bankable of the bunch, and he’s also the most out of place. From “The Daily Show” to the addictive American version of “The Office” to The 40-Year-Old Virgin, his talent for playing lonely schmoes suffering from delusions of grandeur is virtually unmatched. In this film, he’s got the solitary angle nailed, but his backstory as a leading Proust scholar whose academic career is ruined when he falls for a student is more of a minor element than you might expect. Ultimately, Carrell’s academic discipline becomes a convoluted metaphor for the importance of pride (or something). 

Meanwhile, Dano has some funny moments as the rebellious teen who takes a vow of silence when his folks won’t let him join the military, and Arkin does all he can with a wealth of vulgarities. But their combined screen presence is tangential to the real story, which centers on both Breslin’s desire to reach the competition and Kinnear’s failure as an aspiring self-help guru. But Breslin, who achieved an eerie degree of detachment in the 2003 schizophrenic thriller Keane, is more of a cardboard prop than anything else this time around. The material doesn’t cull from her striking abilities, but that’s sort of the point, anyway; she’s a naive child, and the real human drama is happening on a level beyond her perception. 

This is where Kinnear comes in. His performance has an effusive everyman quality that transcends average material. He could be a John Doe for a new generation, but in Little Miss Sunshine, that potential is whittled down to simply the strongest flavor in the bubblegum.

None of these characters ever resolve their personal conflicts—if anything, they seem to sink further into their personal bubbles of pessimism—but somehow the film manages to conclude with upbeat, love-your-inner-beauty sappiness, and more or less pulls it off. The gushing sentimentality is a bit much, but who cares? Gondry’s great forthcoming The Science of Sleep boldly tackles how dreams influence our reality; Little Miss Sunshine deals more practically with how reality influences our dreams, which makes its triumph this past year at the Sundance Film Festival something of a self-fulfilling prophesy.