newcritics

Watch the eyes in the opening sequences of Little Miss Sunshine.

This is gratuitous advice because the camera gives us practically nothing else to watch, beginning with the very first shot looking into the eyes of the seven year old Olive widened in hope and wonder and terrible, terrible, fear.

We meet all the main characters by looking close-up into their eyes, and it’s awful and heartbreaking. The eyes of Steve Carrell’s Frank, the failed suicide, are the most startling, as he sits in his wheelchair at the very edge of the screen, as if pushed to the very edge of a cliff, and stares out in blank horror at the nothingness he almost achieved for himself by slashing his wrists and at the nothingness of his life he has to face up to now that he knows he can’t kill himself and he’s going to have to keep on living.

But before we get to see Frank’s eyes, we’ve seen Olive’s, and we’ve seen the eyes of Paul Dano as her teenage brother Dwayne as he catches sight of himself in the mirror and in a glance sizes himself up and dismisses himself as having failed again to measure up to the super-humanly high standard he’s set for himself and failed again to make progress towards the almost impossibly out of reach goal he’s determined upon.

And we’ve seen the eyes of Toni Collette as their mother, Sheryl, as she argues on the phone with her husband, shifting all about, avoiding settling on anything until she tells him a trivial lie—then her gaze focuses, inward, on herself, full of accusation and disgust.

And we’ve seen by not seeing the eyes of their grandfather, played by Alan Arkin. When the camera catches Arkin his eyes are hooded and then they are closed as he sinks into a drug-induced dream, refusing to see what his life has become.

But it’s the eyes of their father, husband, and son, Richard, that are the most telling.

Richard (Greg Kinnear) is finishing up the lecture that closes his seminar on his Nine Step Program for Success. The lights come up and we find ourselves in the kind of barren classroom that community colleges hold night classes in at their satellite campuses in the company of the handful of people who have signed up for the seminar. Richard finishes his speech on a rousing note and his few listeners applaud, some politely, at least one enthusiastically, but none convincingly to Richard’s ears, and for a moment the professional earnestness goes out of his eyes. He looks out at the classroom with absolute honesty and he can’t hold his disciples’ gaze. His eyes dart away, full of embarrassment and apology.

“There are two kinds of people in this world,” Richard has said—in the first spoken lines of the film—“Winners and losers.” And in that moment Richard’s admitting to himself that he’s a loser.

This is Kinnear’s movie.

Abigail Breslin as Olive has understandably won all the attention. Her performance is so bright and natural that every time the camera finds her the screen glows. It’s impossible to imagine this movie without her, and it’s no wonder she’s been nominated for Best Supporting Actress, although I hope Rinko Kikuchi wins for her role in Babel.

But Olive really is a supporting player. Richard is the main character, and the story of the movie is his change from being the villain of his family to its hero. If that’s not obvious it’s because Kinnear is such a generous, self-effacing, a pitch-perfect actor; he blends into the ensemble the way individuals blend into their families. Lines between personalities blur, cause gets lost in effect, what makes a family—or a troupe of actors—work isn’t always clear because it’s hard to separate the actor from the reactor, and an apparent virtue in one member might actually be a response to a greater virtue, or a disguised vice or failure, in another.

Richard has sold his soul to the devil of the idea of success. He has warped his whole family life around himself. His apparent support of his stepson Dwayne’s determination to become a test pilot and the goofy, unnecessary acts of self-discipline Dwayne’s imposed upon himself to help him keep focused on his goal, his championing of his daughter’s ambitions to be a beauty queen are signs of Richard’s self-centeredness. He’s turned his children into living examples of the efficacy of his Nine Step Program for Success. When he talks about their dreams he sounds like he’s making a sales pitch. He can already see them starring in his TV commercials.

His suicidal brother-in-law hasn’t been in the house more an hour before Richard has started turning him into a negative example.

And he has forced his wife to erase herself from his sight.

Sheryl is a classic enabler, always willing to pretend that everything’s all right. Even when she seems to be admitting to pain, as when she tries to explain to Olive why her uncle tried to kill himself, she instinctively sugarcoats. Richard’s dedication to his Nine Step Program, to making himself one of life’s winner’s, is destroying their family, eating up all their money, turning them all into supporting players in Richard’s personal drama, forcing them all to sacrifice and deny, and it’s become her job to make it all work out by denying there are any problems. Toni Collette understands that very often what people like Sheryl are denying is their own anger. Sheryl is furious with Richard at what he’s doing to them but she doesn’t dare let go. So what she does is try to hide herself from him.

She doesn’t do a good job of it. The closest she can come to disappearing is to become a cipher. Which is what Richard wants and needs because whenever her real self slips out so does her anger and doubt.

Kinnear never makes a play for the audience’s sympathy, before or after he changes. When Richard is at his most self-centered worst, Kinnear doesn’t give us any signs to latch onto that Richard is at heart a decent and loving husband, a concerned and interested father, a loyal and helpful son. And when Richard does change and starts acting as if he is all those things, because that’s who he really is, Kinnear still makes no grabs for our heartstrings.

Richard is a hard-working and disciplined man. That’s his main virtue. That’s what convinced him he had something to teach people about becoming successful. He doesn’t let his feelings get in the way of what he thinks are his responsibilities, not when his feelings are all selfish ones, and not when he’s allowed his better nature to take over.

After that initial dropping of the mask in his first scene, Kinnear never lets us see another glimpse of Richard’s self-doubt or self-loathing. His eyes become hard and opaque. He is always smooth, usually calm, restrained, except for a few flare-ups of temper, his voice is gentle, but that hardness in his eyes never softens. They’re always the eyes of a man determined to see only what he wants to see, which is another way of saying that they are eyes that refuse to see other people, even the people he supposedly loves, for what they are.

The evil of dividing the world into winners and losers is that it makes some people matter and other people, most other people, irrelevent. A loser is a nothing, a non-person, invisible.

When Dwayne observes that all of life is a beauty pageant, what he’s describing is that sudden vanishing of the losers brought about on the TV screen by the camera’s complete and total focus on the winner. All those other girls who were so important up till a minute ago are suddenly gone and forgotten, as if they and their talents and their dreams had never existed. All that’s left is the winner.

Richard’s eyes have adopted that camera’s narrow focus.

Kinnear doesn’t pick one moment when Richard changes and his eyes light up and widen again. The worst thing that Richard thinks could happen to him happens and then something worse happens and then something even more terrible than that. With each jolt Kinnear looks slightly more dazed, slightly less determined, but still closed off, still lost in himself, as if still thinking about how to save his dream, only now he’s thinking with more desperate speed, and it’s not until he’s forced to make a choice between doing the responsible, realistic thing and making his daughter happy that we realize that he has already changed.

What we see as Richard organizes the family’s escape from a bureaucratic hell and rushes them off to make Olive’s check-in at the Little Miss Sunshine pageant is a man who can finally straighten up after having let go of a heavy load he’s been carrying all movie long.

That’s when we realize that part of the hardness in Richard’s eyes was strain. Richard has been carrying the weight of his big mistake, the Nine Step Program, and somewhere along the way, almost without noticing it, he dropped it. And slowly, relieved of the strain and the stress, he’s been relaxing, recouping his strength, coming back to feeling like his old self before he picked up that stupid rock.

There are no more winners and losers. There are only people, and one of them who depends on him needs to be somewhere.

Watch the eyes at the beginning of Little Miss Sunshine. Watch Kinnear’s eyes all the way through.