The Hoover family cannot afford plane tickets. That is the first thing Little Miss Sunshine gets right, and everything else follows from it.
Trailer, via SearchlightPictures.
Seven-Year-Old in a Yellow Van
Little Miss Sunshine is a 2006 American tragicomedy. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris directed it, in their first feature job, from a script by Michael Arndt. The cast is an ensemble: Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Paul Dano, Abigail Breslin and Alan Arkin. All six play members of one family.
Sheryl Hoover lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is raising two children under strain. Her husband Richard sells motivational speaking and life coaching, or tries to. Dwayne is Sheryl’s teenage son from an earlier marriage. He admires Nietzsche and has stopped speaking until he becomes a fighter pilot. Frank Ginsberg, Sheryl’s brother, is a Proust scholar who moved in after a suicide attempt. Richard’s father Edwin lives there too, having been evicted from a retirement home for snorting heroin.
Olive is seven. Edwin has been coaching her for beauty pageants. She qualifies for the “Little Miss Sunshine” contest in Redondo Beach, California, and it is two days away.
Pushing the Van to Third Gear
Richard, Sheryl and Edwin want Olive to compete. Frank and Dwayne cannot be left behind. So all six drive the 800 miles (1,300 km) in a yellow Volkswagen van.
The van breaks. The clutch goes early, and after that the only way to move it is to shove it until it is rolling fast enough for the driver to shift into third, then dive through the open side door. The horn later starts honking on its own. The side door comes off entirely at one point.
The setbacks are not only mechanical. At a gas station, while buying pornography for Edwin, Frank runs into the ex-boyfriend who left him for an academic rival — the same man whose departure set off Frank’s suicide attempt. Richard loses a contract with businessman Stan Grossman that would have launched his motivational business. Edwin snorts heroin in his room.
The family keeps driving. They find they need each other.
A Casting Search in Every English-Speaking Country
Casting directors Kim Davis and Justine Baddeley had worked with Dayton and Faris on music videos. The two traveled to “every English-speaking country” hunting for the actress to play Olive. Breslin won the part in an audition at age six.
Dano was hired as Dwayne two years before cameras rolled. To prepare, he kept his own vow of silence for a few days.
Frank was written for Bill Murray. The studio also pushed for Robin Williams. Dayton and Faris went with Carell instead, a few months out from filming.
“When we met with Steve Carell, we didn’t know he could do this based upon what he had done,” the directors said in an interview. “But when we met with him and talked to him about the character, the tone of the movie and the way we were approaching it, he was right on the same page with us.”
At that point Carell was a Comedy Central regular from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and little else in Hollywood. Producers doubted he was a big enough name and doubted his experience.
Sundance, Fox Searchlight and $101 Million
Big Beach Films made Little Miss Sunshine for US$8 million. The shoot ran 30 days across Arizona and Southern California, starting June 6, 2005.
The premiere was at Sundance on January 20, 2006. Fox Searchlight Pictures then bought distribution rights in one of the largest deals in the festival’s history. American audiences saw it in limited release from July 26, 2006, with a wider rollout beginning August 18.
It grossed $101 million. Reviews singled out the performances, the directing, Arndt’s screenplay and the humor.
The 79th Academy Awards gave it four nominations, Best Picture among them. Arndt took Best Original Screenplay. Arkin took Best Supporting Actor. Breslin was nominated for Best Supporting Actress — the role that made her name.
What the Road Film Is Actually About
Family, depression, self-acceptance, meaning found in absurd conditions. That is the theme list, and it reads like a pitch deck. The film is better than its own summary.
Little Miss Sunshine never invites you to laugh at these people. Edwin snorts heroin and drills a seven-year-old on her pageant walk. Frank tried to kill himself over a man he then meets at a gas station. Dwayne has quit talking. Richard is selling a program nobody buys. The film sets each fact down and leaves it there.
The van carries the argument. It will not move unless somebody gets out and pushes. Nobody in this family can leave alone, and nobody can stay alone either. That is not a subtle metaphor, and the film does not need it to be.
The casting is the second reason it holds. Carell was the risk the producers did not want, a television correspondent with almost no film credits, in a part written for Bill Murray. Dayton and Faris cast him anyway. Dano spent real days in silence. Breslin beat out a global search at six years old.
Arndt and Arkin won. The film lost Best Picture and Breslin lost Best Supporting Actress. Those two losses are where to look. Little Miss Sunshine is a small movie — $8 million, 30 days, two first-timers at the helm — that carried itself like a large one. Four nominations, two wins, $101 million on an $8 million budget. That is not luck. That is a film that found exactly the audience it was built for.
The Part Worth Watching
The pageant is not the point. It is the destination, and the film treats it as one. The point is the 800 miles before it, and the fact that these six people keep climbing back into the van.
The film runs 102 minutes and spends none of them explaining why the Hoovers are like this. Edwin is foul-mouthed, evicted and snorting heroin in his room, and the film neither forgives him nor diagnoses him. Frank meets the man who caused his suicide attempt while running an errand for his father-in-law. That is a joke and a wound in the same shot, and Little Miss Sunshine plays it flat.
What the film asks is that you accept the absurdity without resolving it. Nothing is cured at the end of the road. There is a van that needs pushing and people who push.
That is a modest ambition, met completely. This is not a great film the way that year’s Best Picture winner was great. It is a precise one. Every piece — the cast, the script, the van, the 30-day shoot — does exactly the job it was hired for and no more.
An 8 of 10, earned on craft rather than sentiment, and earned without pretending the Hoovers are fixed.
The Numbers
- Title: Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
- Directors: Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (directorial debut)
- Writer: Michael Arndt
- Runtime: 102 minutes
- Budget: US$8 million
- Box office: $101 million
- Shoot: 30 days in Arizona and Southern California, from June 6, 2005
- Sundance premiere: January 20, 2006
- US release: Limited from July 26, 2006; wider from August 18, 2006
- Academy Awards: 4 nominations, 2 wins (Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor)
- Published critical score: 8.0/10 (Metacritic 80/100)
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