Little Miss Sunshine and (briefly) Talladega Nights and The Descent.
Little Miss Sunshine, 2006. Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, written by Michael Arndt. Starring Abigail Breslin, Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Paul Dano, and Alan Arkin.
Now showing at the Uptown Theater.
Greg Kinnear looks like a nice, square guy. He’s from Indiana, the nation’s suburb, is the son of a diplomat and has a brother who works for Billy Graham. The guy pledged a frat, speaks fluent Greek, donated money to Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign, and graduated from the University of Arizona. You couldn’t cast Greg as a villain, give him a role as a coal miner, or a salty dog on a whaling ship. Kinnear doesn’t have the ability to play a respectable president, what with his buggy-eyed way of responding to trouble and his aw-shucks method of tossing up his hands in frustration. It goes without saying that Kinnear is a limited actor.
Jimmy Stewart was also a limited actor, but he remains, in my opinion, one of the finest in American history. Thing is, Stewart knew how to fit into the roles he was given and make them utterly his own. Most importantly, Jimmy had a stretch in the mid 1950s where he challenged himself and his public persona with some of the most bizarre roles in Hollywood’s golden age (most notably Vertigo and Winchester ’73). I mention this because Kinnear has become the closest approximation of Jimmy Stewart we have today, a respectable actor who works within his contexts and makes some startling movies. Kinnear is handsome, he can be wholesome, and he possesses the ability to show the everyman as a simmering, frustrated, yet friendly fellow. He has fabulous comic timing, and will take on films from Auto Focus to Little Miss Sunshine, a range of movies that probably won’t do to increase his appeal to middle America. Greg Kinnear could be our most underrated actor.
He’s precisely what makes Little Miss Sunshine a success, limited though it is. Cram a VW van full of six wonderful actors working in tandem with one another, and you’ve got something. There’s Kinnear, Steve Carell (the heart of the movie), Alan Arkin (always a joy), the underrated Toni Collette, and newcomers Abigail Breslin and Paul Dano. While the direction is often workmanlike and the script a poor mix of moderately funny lines mixed with dead jokes and fish-in-a-barrel wisecracks, this ensemble works like the Minnesota Twins on a win-streak: unbeatable and fun to watch. Little Miss Sunhine will not garnish any awards for its cast, even though it could be the best acted film so far this year.
The facts: Frank (Steve Carell) retreats to his sister Sheryl’s (Toni Collette) home after attempting to take his own life. His despondency peaked when his male graduate student, whom he was in love with, left Frank, the top U.S. Proust scholar, for he number two Proustian. Frank’s ill behavior in response to this crisis also cost him his job and nearly his life.
Sheryl lives with husband Richard (Kinnear) and their family. Theirs is a suburban nightmare, a house whose interior looks last updated in 1987, messy, crowded with people who are tense and frustrated with life and one another. There’s Dwayne (Paul Dano), who is enduring a vow of silence because of his admiration for Nietzsche, and who longs to join the Air Force. Alan Arkin is Grandpa, addicted to heroin, kicked out of his nursing home, who teaches the titular Little Miss Sunshine, Olive (Abigail Breslin), her pageant moves. And Richard is struggling to sell a nine-step motivational program that he created. He is an abject failure, a goofy Willy Loman who is a giant pain in the ass to everyone. Collette’s Sheryl is just trying to keep the family together.
Young Olive gets news that she has been given a spot in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in Redondo Beach, California. Because Frank cannot be left alone, he is forced to come along, as is Dwayne, who is given the job of watching over his suicidal uncle. Grandpa has to tag along because he trained Olive. Because plane tickets are far too expensive, the family hits the road in a yellow VW bus. Along the way their clutch goes, the horn gets stuck, they run afoul of a porn-loving cop, and all hell breaks loose at the pageant.
The screenwriter, Michael Arndt, does a ham-fisted job of getting this group into the van and driving across the country. The film is light on its feet and sharp when the family’s at home, but veers into every imaginable cliche on the road. Not to mention the implausibility and cruelty of the plot: every single dream that Little Miss Sunshine’s characters have is crushed in the course of the film. The only two who don’t have a dream–Grandpa and Sheryl–die or have no real personality. Perhaps the greatest weakness of this film is the latter: Toni Collette, another underrated actress with amazing range (she can be luscious in Japanese Story, poignant in Sixth Sense, and funny here) has no character, whatsoever. She seems to lose her focus after the first ten minutes.
And Arendt takes cheap shots at an easy target in the pageant, giving us a Southern shrew in charge of the whole mess and a creepy pageant judge who seems a pale shadow of Fred Willard. Since the film isn’t even really about beauty pageants, this comes off as cruel and witless. As a screenwriter, Arendt is so unfocused you can hardly say that the film is about anything–the dad trying to be a success, the kid hungering for meaning, the suicidal uncle, all of these are merely conflicts to create resolution and a few knee-slappers. Little Miss Sunshine has an episodic, HBO TV feel about it, as every conflict is resolved in half hour increments, and the cathartic end is forced.
This is a shame, because the actors are working these characters for all they’re worth. Kinnear is just golden, struggling to keep his smile pasted on, bringing real dignity to an inglorious character who is forced to eat shit all the way through the movie.
It is the sheer joy these actors bring to this weak material that makes this film work, and work fairly well. Don’t come to this movie expecting to be floored or even to double over with laughter. But do come to watch six actors doing what they do best.
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, 2006. Directed by Adam McKay, written by McKay and Will Ferrell. Starring Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jane Lynch, Gary Cole, and Amy Adams.
Now playing everywhere.
Talladega Nights is yet another feature-length skit-style flick with a former Saturday Night Live cast member, in this case Will Ferrell. It has moments of sometimes sublime laughter, most often those times when Ferrell has to match wits with Sacha Baron Cohen, playing a ridiculous gay French driver. Unfortunately, most of the jokes are awful; many, including what begins as a hilarious scene of Grace at the dinner table, labor on to cringe-inducing moments of painful unfunniness. Clearly, Ferrell and his director/co-writer Adam McKay wanted to skewer the NASCAR circuit–an easy target, in my opinion–but also felt that they needed NASCAR-lovin’ fans to turn out in droves. So the film, while steering clear of true skewering, eventually falls into the tar pit of actual caring, that awful moment in mainstream American comedy where the laughs are set aside and lessons are learned.
Most egregious in this film is the fact that, once again, we get to see a pair of great comedienne’s talent wasted. Molly Shannon has been reduced to playing shrewish bit parts that undermine both her sexiness and her ability to toss out dialogue with wit and verve, and Jane Lynch, so well used in Christopher Guest’s mock-documentaries, has her style and grace smothered in a caricature of a Southern-fried Grammaw.
Characters come and go, the plot is a mess, and probably eighty percent of the jokes are lame as the Jeff Gordon-is-a-homo types that NASCAR fans adore.
The Descent, 2006. Written and directed by Neil Marshall. Starring Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, Saskia Mulder, Nora-Jane Noone, Molly Cayll, Oliver Milburne, and a cast of men and women who are the creepy crawlies.
Now playing everywhere.
While waiting in line for The Descent, a young man asked me what I was going to see. When I told him, he shuddered and said, “Oh, man, there’s no way I can see that shit. I live by myself, and those things scare me in the night!” He went, instead, to see Miami Vice, and although I admire his concern over his sleep and mental stability, he made the wrong decision.
It’s nice to be scared again, and to the point where I was grabbing my wife’s arm and fighting to keep my eyes on the screen. The Descent is about a pack of six friends who meet in a remote cabin in North Carolina to go spelunking. There’s an important, though worthless, subplot in which the main character, Sarah (played by Shauna Macdonald), lost her husband and child a year earlier in a car accident scene reminiscent of Verhoven’s The Fourth Man. Sarah had been out white-water rafting with two friends, Juno and Beth (Natalie Mendoza and Alex Reid) who were with her at the hospital when she learned of her loss.
Two years after the tragedy, Juno gathers Sarah and Beth and three others to go caving and try to pick up the pieces after the car accident. The early parts of the film, where usually horror films will waste with needless backstory and filler, seem like something written by Jon Krakauer, full of little clues, arrogance and ignorance meeting to create a disaster.
I’ll thank my lucky stars for The Descent, a film that eschews the usual CGI garbage, and sex-starved teens and cheap scares for genuine frights. The frights are USDA Grade A because the director, Neil Marshall, understands that darkness and confusion, noises and only a dollop of actual violence are what make us frightened.
Impressively, Marshall has assembled a group of seven young actresses whose job entails acting frightened but responding to their fears with intelligence and strength. There’s screaming, and I’ll say that references to Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley are somewhat unfounded: Ripley is not an extremely well-written character in much of the Alien films (all overrated but the first), whose mythical status and toughness are as subtle as a decapitation. The women in The Descent are people who are educated, who are fit, who work together at first, and who are allowed (unlike Weaver’s Ripley) to be genuinely terrified but not lose their smarts and bravery in the face of this. They have jealousies and rivalries and a plot twist that isn’t a mammoth surprise but is a welcome diversion from the direction the film is going.
The Descent has a few rough spots, a couple of cheap scares that are unnecessary. But it is great because the dull spots are brief, there is no gaping implausibility (the bane of all horror films), and none of the characters is especially stupid, wandering into dark places just to check out a noise in a closet. Better still, unless you live in a cave, you don’t have to come home and wonder if creatures are hiding under your bed. But you might have a hard time sleeping.
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