Little Miss Sunshine - Preview
Preview by Jack Foley
ENSEMBLE comedy Little Miss Sunshine proved to be one of the hottest properties at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where its popularity proved so much that a bidding war broke out.
Fox Searchlight subsequently secured the distribution rights for the film for more than $10 million, according to the Hollywood Reporter, but was delighted to have acquired such a well-received movie.
The film, starring Steve Carell, Alan Arkin, Toni Collette, and Greg Kinnear, follows the farcical story of a dysfunctional family that bands together to enter the youngest daughter in a beauty pageant.
They subsequently must travel across country in a beat-up VW camper van, during which time their difficulties and tensions come to the fore.
From its snappy, witty trailer alone, the film looks to be laugh-out loud funny and expertly performed, with Carell, in particular, on excellent form.
Little Miss Sunshine is co-directed by first-timers and husband and wife duo Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, who maintain that it has a sweetness in spite of some darker comedy material.
‘‘If it weren’t for everything I love about it – the raunchiness, the language – it would make a [great] family film,” joked Valerie to Entertainment Weekly.
Certainly, the film is lining up to be one of the most keenly anticipated comedies of the autumn schedule based on the glowing reviews to come from Sundance in January.
The Hollywood Reporter, for instance, wrote: “A brainy blend of farce and heart, this is one of those movies that veteran moviegoers complain they don’t make anymore.”
While Variety was similarly gushing: “A quietly antic dysfunctional family road trip comedy that shoots down the all-American culture of the winner and offers sweet redemption for losers – or at least the ordinary folks often branded as such.”
Box Office Magazine, meanwhile, concluded: “Shrewdly balancing the ironies of the morbid inclinations of the film’s Hoover clan and an underlying tenderness that steers away from obvious sentimentality, Michael Arndt’s script shines with the support of the superb cast.”