Co-directors Jonathon Dayton and Valerie Faris's mini-epic family romp acts much like the mirrors set in tiny rooms to gain a sense of space. Like many indie films, Sunshine uses time and plot sparingly, yet in such a way that leaves the viewer with the feel of a full film. Greg Kinnear plays a father and self-help speaker trying to push his spiel national. Nursing home reject and Grandpa Alan Arkin is a bad boy druggie and sexpert who coaches his pageant queen-hopeful granddaughter (Abigail Breslin) Olive's dancing.
Enter Uncle Frank, an irresistibly terse Steve Carell, a disgraced literature professor freshly returned from the hospital on suicide watch to bunk with his morbid, mute fifteen-year-old nephew. When asked why he's stopped speaking, Dwayne (Paul Dano) points to a wall-sized caricature of Friedrich Nietzsche in reply. It's off to the funny farm from there, each character's personality colliding with the next as though this were a stage play in which everybody's a little bit twisted. And then there’s the Mom (Toni Collette) who wants nothing but honesty in her family and what's best for her kids.
The stage-play elements of the opening might normally come off as a bit trite, but this cast makes it work. In a noteworthy moment, the camera kneels along with Dad. Bracing his young daughter's shoulders, he wrings from her the promise that their trip to California to enter her in the “Little Miss Sunshine” beauty pageant will end in triumph. Olive puts on a brave face and the family piles into the reliable old microbus for a cross-country run.
From there, we are plunged into the soups of human trials that smacks a bit of The Grapes of Wrath and films like Home for the Holidays. This family’s emotional challenges and achievements are so earthy and unpretentious, the humor so warm and sweetly lighthearted that big things become small and manageable. Where another viewpoint might have mired their problems in a more depressing model, Michael Arndt’s debut script takes daunting family issues like suicide and drug addiction and provides them with a very human and watchable perspective.
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