Flick of The Day: Little Miss Sunshine

It is a rare enough thing to come across a film that you see without any preconceptions or expectations. It is rarer still for such a film to be joyously fantastic with every frame from beginning to end. Little Miss Sunshine is such a film and remains a personal favourite some 7 years after I first encountered it. It combines a quirky tale of modern family life with a diverse and vibrant cast of characters. It's funny, sad, and wickedly life affirming throughout.

Sheryl, the divine Toni Collette, is an overburdened mother in Albuquerque, where she lives with her precocious daughter Olive played by the excellent Abigail Breslin, her delightfully huffy and unhappy in the way only teenagers can be son Dwayne, played by Paul Dano and her husband Richard, a self help guru with a clue played by the always watch-able Greg Kinnear. The family is rounded out by Grandpa Edwin, a foul mouthed Alan Arkin who enjoys snorting heroin and speaking his mind. Into this family unit steps Sheryl's brother Frank played by Steve Carell, the nations foremost Proust scholar who has recently attempted suicide and needs a place to stay. Olive has been prepping for her upcoming début as a beauty queen in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant. Due to a series of complications, the family are forced to set out across the country in a yellow VW bus to reach the pageant in Redondo beach, California.  Despite each having their own problems and goals, they band together to get Olive to her goal. Dwayne has taken a vow of silence until he becomes a test pilot, Richard is trying to sell his self-help programme and Frank is struggling with depression.

 The real strength of the movie is Michael Arndt's script which is just packed with humour and carries and emotional punch not often seen in an ostensibly comic film. He creates a world and a cast of character that are a pleasure to spend time with. The dialogue ebbs and flows with a ring of authenticity, and the stellar cast reflects this quality. As an ensemble, the cast are very well chosen. There are no weak performances but a special mention must go to Alan Arkin who is superb as Edwin. 

From the opening sequence where the various characters are introduced at a family dinner, there is a sense that everyone has a real purpose and motivation in the story and that their actions which may seem random will eventually pay off at the story's denouement. Making this effort to ensure that the audience knows and likes the characters is time well spent before we set off on our road trip across the south-west United States. The various foibles of the cast are ripe for comedy and this is a very  funny film. The humour is carefully balanced with the emotional depth of real human drama. These are real people not comic caricatures.

A superb film, from beginning to end the script is packed with humour and pathos. The ensemble cast are perfectly chosen and play their parts with an obvious love for the role. Even the soundtrack with cuts from Devotchka and Sufjan Stevens is apt. If you haven't seen this film yet, you really should.

Flick of The Day: Mary and Max

From strange beginnings can great things grow. At first glance a claymation adaptation of the true life pen pal relationship between an obese middle aged New Yorker and a lonely young girl from the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia would not seem like a promising idea for a film. However, in the hands of Australian animator Adam Elliott it becomes a truly ground breaking piece of cinema. Today's flick of the day is Mary & Max.

Mary & Max

In 1976, a young girl named Mary, voiced by Toni Collette struggles with loneliness due to her alcoholic mother and emotionally absent father. One day on a trip to the post office, she picks a name from the New York phone directory and decides to write to them. Her letter reaches Max Horowitz voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman, a 44 year old Jewish man who struggles with obesity and Asperger's syndrome. Amazingly, these two misanthropes who live on the margins of their own society find in each other a friend with which to converse and share their doubts, worries and neuroses and love of chocolate over the course of 20 years. Where they initially appear as oddballs and outsiders, we gradually see that both are perceptive and aware of the world around them and perhaps more importantly far nicer human beings than those supposedly normal folk.

A work of incredible depth and emotional maturity, it transcends its genre to tell a tale that everyone should know. It is not a happy story and not for children but it is a worthy one all the same. Rarely have issues such as mental illness, loneliness and isolation been dealt with in such a mature manner in a piece of cinema. It's a dark and beautiful picture and one will surely be left with a lot to think over for having seen it.

While the animation is the star of the show, the voice work is excellent throughout. Toni Collette and Philip Seymour Hoffman are unrecognisable in their voice characters and perhaps that is as it should be. While the film shows a bleak view of the world, it is this bleakness which gives it such an emotional punch and it is perhaps closer to the reality of many lives than we dare to admit. The relationship between the two allows Mary to open up to the world, indeed the animation noticeably brightens as her own confidence improves while Max finds that which he has sought all his life, a friend.

Overall then this is a triumph of a film with a deep message about what friendship means. As the film notes at its close "God gave us relatives, thank God we can choose our friends".