“What was Little Miss Sunshine if not a brilliant ontological dissection of the perils of sublimation? Every one of the characters is undone by the pressure to conform to the entertainment- celebrity complex ideal, to find a suitable success shape that will justify their existence to the world — everyone but the Alan Arkin character, who chooses hedonism.
“What I love about Little Miss Sunshine are the philosophical questions it raises about how we live, how we should live, how we should be.” — Carina Chocano posting in Slate‘s Movie Club.
“Undone” but not beaten. Paul Dano‘s “Dwayne” character gets past his obsession with being an Air Force jet pilot by the end of the film. And isn’t Steve Carell‘s “Frank” pretty much divested of any success dreams at the get-go, having tried and failed to commit suicide and barely able to lift a half-enthusiastic eyebrow about anything? The nice thing is that he’s in pretty good spiritual shape by the end of the Sunshine journey.