I struggled to figure out why Little Miss Sunshine was lauded by so many and consequently nominated for awards left and right (and finally winning Best Screenplay at the Oscar's on Sunday). For me, it was a bit too much calculated quirkiness. I like the idea of a parody road-trip movie, that's funny in itself, and intriguing with the dark twist Little Miss was advertised to have. But the idea alone isn't enough to sustain a feature-length film. Depth to characters, for one, needs to be there. The people in Little Miss Sunshine are more like ornaments. Alan Arkin as Grandpa is hooked on heroin; mom and dad (Toni Collette and Greg Kinnear) fight incessantly; big brother is mute (and reads Frederick Nietzsche); and his uncle Frank (Steve Carell) is a suicidal Proust scholar. Besides the fact that I, too, would be suicidal were I a career Proust authority, his is the character that made the least sense to me. It sounded like literary name-dropping rather than real dimension. It's very easy to reference high-art, but to match it is difficult without looking like an imitation.
Out of that murk came the little sister, Olive (Abigail Breslin), who was a genuine beam of light when she was happy, the inverse when she was sad. Breslin's character (and Breslin herself) was inspired; the rest were cardboard facsimiles of an archetype. Individually there were fun moments. Steve Carell can deliver a joke with panache, even if it's just okay material. The same can be said for Greg Kinnear, who recurs more and more as a dramatic actor (But how I loved him from the Talk Soup days!) Toni Collette is enthralling in anything she does, always transcending her real persona (I particularly like her in About A Boy (2002)). Alan Arkin is an undeniable force.
Yet with all of that, and to my utter dismay, I was bored.
No comments:
Post a Comment