Little Miss Sunshine

I saw Little Miss Sunshine on Friday night. It was the first time I’ve seen a major motion picture on opening day in about five years.

Greg Kinnear plays a failing motivational speaker who’s still using an overhead projector in 2006, Steve Carell plays a spurned gay professor recovering from a suicide attempt and Adam Arkin plays a grandfather evicted from the nursing home for snorting heroin. Kinnear’s wife, played by Toni Collette, is fraying in her efforts to hold everything together. His misanthropic 15-year-old son, Dwayne (Paul Dano), has taken a vow of silence, while his endearingly quirky seven-year-old daughter, Olive (Abigail Breslin), is determined to compete in a child beauty pageant. Despite their own collective mess of personal dysfunctions and humiliations, everyone in the family rallies behind Olive and piles into a VW minivan to make sure she gets to the pageant in California.

Despite some hackneyed plot devices, I thought Little Miss Sunshine was well-acted and quite funny. I’ve read a few reviews likening the movie to Harold and Maude (one of my all-time favorites) because of its semi-macabre, offbeat tone, but I think David O. Russell’s Flirting with Disaster might be a more apt comparison. I have a feeling it’ll be one of those "grower" movies that gets a lot of word-of-mouth business.

Upon exiting the Barton Creek Cinemark, I saw a guy in a track suit gesticulating wildly as he praised some movie like he was Quentin Tarantino. I looked again and realized it was Quentin Tarantino.