Ambiance festive et conviviale
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Sortie en salles
Le film est sorti aux États-Unis le 26 juillet 200612, et sa première projection en Europe a eu lieu le 12 août 2006 au festival international du film de Locarno.
Musique
La majeure partie de la bande originale a été écrite par le groupe Devotchka. Deux chansons sont écrites par Sufjan Stevens, issues de ses albums Illinois et The Avalanche. Lors de la danse d'Olive au concours, la chanson qu'elle fait jouer est Super Freak de Rick James.
Réception /Critique
Le film a reçu des critiques positives par presque tous les commentateurs. Sur le site Rotten Tomatoes, Little Miss Sunshine a obtenu 91 % de critiques positives, sur la base de 205 commentaires, avec une note moyenne de 7.7 sur 10. Sur le site Metacritic, qui utilise un système de notation normalisé, le film a obtenu une note favorable de 80 sur 100 basé sur 36 commentaires avec une note moyenne de 7.5 sur 10
Box-office États-Unis
Sorti de façon limitée en salles (seules sept salles de cinéma distribuent le film du 26 juillet au 3 août, avant une augmentation de combinaison de salles, de 58 à 153 maximum), Little Miss Sunshine se classe 36e dès sa sortie avec 128 014 $, puis 20e dès sa première semaine d'exploitation avec 738 182 $. Faisant doucement sa carrière, il réussit à monter à la 17e la semaine suivante à la 12e avec 7 081 214 $.
Distribué sur tout le territoire américain (avec une combinaison maximale de 1 602 salles), le film obtient un meilleur score se classant septième dès le 18 août 2006 pour une semaine avec des recettes de 15 523 994 $, dépassant ainsi le budget de 8 millions.Le film obtient sa meilleure place au box-office américain (la 3e) dès sa 5e semaine d'exploitation avec 26 107 975 $.Au final, Little Miss Sunshine a récolté 59 891 098 dollars de recettes aux États-Unis.
Dans le Monde
Little Miss Sunshine a engrangé un bénéfice net de 100 millions de dollars au box-office mondial, ce qui est un record pour un film indépendant à l'époque, avant que Juno, autre film du cinéma indépendant américain produit par Fox Searchlight, n'atteigne les 231 millions de dollars de recettes mondiales, pour un budget de 6,5 millions de dollars.
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Author: imaginarytruths from United States
26 July 2006
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
I hate to admit it, but my primary interest in showing up for the screening was to see Steve Carell try his hand at a semi-serious role as the suicidal gay literature professor.
But it's not Steve Carell's film. It's a startling departure for him, a nuanced and heartfelt performance that's just as strong as his career-making turn in 40 Year Old Virgin. Likewise, this film does not in any way belong to Toni Collette, Greg Kinnear, or Alan Arkin, all of whom are at the absolute top of their games and each of whom is allowed many moments within the ensemble structure to create a complex and compelling character. Hell, the film doesn't even belong to Paul Dano, who's just as good as his more experienced co-stars even though he doesn't have a single line of dialogue in the first 80% of the movie.
No, this film is owned wholly and entirely by a nine-year-old actress named Abigail Breslin. I think a lot of viewers might miss it because she's surrounded by enormously talented performers and is "golly gee whiz" "aw shucks" cute, but this performance is, all hyperbole aside, Oscarworthy. The entire film hangs on her emotional vulnerability and she is achingly real in every moment of joy, sorrow, confusion, desolation, and determination. The closest comparison I can think of is Amy Adams in Junebug. She's that good.
OK, I seem to be writing this review backwards. Let's see if I can pull together a plot description. The film is basically a dark comedy dysfunctional family road trip. It starts out resoundingly bleak. Richard (Kinnear) is a wannabe motivational speaker who in his desperate drive for excellence has become deeply alienated from his family. His wife Sheryl (Collette) tries to keep their family together but is so frustrated with her husband and nerve- shredded by the stresses of her home that it seems like she will cave in at any moment. Also in the home is Steve's elderly father, who is perpetually profane and angry and copes with the disappointments of his life by snorting heroin.
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Richard and Sheryl are raising two children, the cute but seemingly unremarkable Olive (Breslin) and the perpetually silent, glum, and angry Dwayne (Dano), who is marking off the days until he can go join the Air Force and escape this familial hellhole. Into this enclave of joy and bliss enters Sheryl's brother Frank, who has just been released from the hospital after trying to slit his wrists due to his unrequited love for one of his grad students. When Sheryl tells her brother that she's glad he's alive, he tonelessly responds "that makes one of us."
These are the characters. I know they must seem like pathetic indie stereotypes, but over the course of the film each of them is revealed as a multi-dimensional person struggling miserably but nobly to make the best of a life that is not working out the way they had hoped. And despite the gloomy set-up, this twisted thing becomes the most life-affirming film I've seen since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
It's not a perfect film by any means. At times it feels a little contrived, as if several years of trauma were compressed into two days. And while the climax undeniably represents the most ruthless skewering of beauty pageants in the history of cinema, skewering beauty pageants doesn't in itself really qualify as daring satire.Nonetheless, the film packs an emotional wallop that's going to take a lot of people by surprise.And I haven't even mentioned that it happens to be the funniest movie of the year.
