Little Miss Sunshine feels like a more mainstream sibling of films from last year like The Squid And The Whale and Me and You and Everyone We Know and unsurprisingly given the film’s wider distribution it doesn’t have the same psychological weight, deadpan humour, or dysfunction as those films.
That may be just as well as several parents seemed to have chosen the film’s title above its ‘R’ rating and brought small children along to see it. Hopefully those children were able to enjoy the soundtrack—so well put together by DeVotchKa—and ignore the less appropriate scenes and language.
The fact that the film didn’t appeal to me quite so much two of my favourite films of 2005 is not to say this film doesn’t have its fair share of humour—or dysfunction—and it definitely provides an enjoyable couple of hours of movie viewing. It’s worth seeing for the last ten minutes alone, which demonstrate perhaps the only reasonable response to their setting.
Tags: little miss sunshine, me and you and everyone we know, the squid and the whale