Little Miss Sunshine: Exposition as Characterization

Few movies have impacted me as profoundly as Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton's Little Miss Sunshine has. This movie is brilliantly written (by Michael Arndt), cleverly acted, and beautifully shot, but in this post I want to discuss one specific scene that I believe is a masterclass in characterization.

This scene occurs early on in the script, only a few scenes in, and is the first time we see the entire family together, all seated for dinner: Olive, the young and ambitious pageant girl, Dwayne, the quiet teenage son, Uncle Frank, the suicidal scholar, Richard, the arrogant motivational speaker, Grandpa Hoover, the vulgar and coke addicted grandfather, and Sheryl, the mother and often the voice of reason in the family. All anyone really needs to know for this scene is that Sheryl has just retrieved her brother, Frank, from the hospital following a suicide attempt, and has decided to bring him home to safety, at least temporarily. In the excerpt from the script below, Frank has just learned why Dwayne refuses to speak (he's planning to join the Naval Army to become a fighter pilot), and Richard has taken it upon himself to explain the merit of Dwayne's decision.

Let's look at how Michael Arndt's exposition is carefully woven into the dialogue not simply to shovel information down the audience's throats, but as a tool to peel back layers of character. Richard's line "I think it shows tremendous discipline", already prompts his wife to step on the brakes -- she knows what he's about to lay on the table. From this, we can already begin to slowly realize Richard's character as the haughty speech-giver. He then says that Dwayne is "pursuing that dream with focus and discipline. In fact, I was thinking about the Nine Steps..." Not only through this do we gain valuable information about Dwayne's character and his motives, but it doubles to characterize Frank as the relentless peddler of his Nine Step program--he can't sell his books to the public, so he might as well push it on his family. Next, Richard says that Dwayne is "utilizing at least seven of them [the Nine Steps] in his journey to personal fulfillment". The mixture between his condescending tone and the fact that he's belittling his son (who can't even measure up to all of Richard's Nine Steps) in front of the entire family establishes his character and sets him up perfectly for the rest of the film. So in just a few lines we discover not only character, but a valuable piece of information: Richard is desperately trying to push his Nine Step program books because, despite his constant preaching about success, he cannot admit that he's a failure.

In this second example, we have a part of the scene a little further along than the last one -- Frank is explaining to his six year old niece why he attempted suicide, much to Richard's disapproval. Throughout this entire conversation, Olive asks her uncle innocent questions about his wrist and why he was in the hospital, prompting Frank to try and answer, prompting Richard to shut the conversation down, and prompting Sheryl to try and alleviate tension. A messy, 4-way dynamic with the occasional crude, yet perceptive comments from Grandpa.

There is a LOT of exposition in this part of the scene -- we're basically getting a play by play of what led to Frank's suicide attempt, and why, and how, and where. We learn everything. And we don't even realize it because it's so well tied together into his character, and simultaneously Arndt crafts the other family member's characters during this part, too. In the way Frank explains what happens, through the most watered down possible version for a child's ears, we learn that he's remorseful and reflective, and that what really sent him over the edge wasn't getting fired from his job or evicted, it was that Larry Sugarman (the man who Frank's lover left him for) had won the coveted MacArthur Genius Grant. It's still early in the film to know exactly what is at the core of what Frank values, and the lines here are blurred -- is it love or prestige? Either way, the layers are peeled back further and further as we understand important pieces of both backstory and character, which is accomplished throughout this scene in the cleverest way possible.