"The money part of it was almost off-putting," says Jonathan Dayton, who directed the film with Valerie Faris, his wife of 18 years. "That's the story people talk about. There's this weird pressure on the movie all of a sudden, and our philosophy has always been to stay under the radar. As soon as you're hot, you're on your way to being cold."

Adds Faris, "We prefer to stay lukewarm."

Although they've worked with artists from Janet Jackson to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Dayton and Faris look more like they should be running a hip breakfast joint than hobnobbing with stadium-filling stars. They don't finish each other's sentences, but only because when they're both revved up, it's rare for either one to complete a thought. In other words, like any long-standing couple, they function as a unit, sometimes amplifying and sometimes correcting each other, but eventually moving in the same direction.

The same description could easy apply to the Hoovers, who cram their dysfunctions into a VW bus for a trip to a West Coast beauty pageant. The parallel between the movie's family and Dayton and Faris' — they have three children, the oldest a teenager — is obvious, but the directors identify most strongly with the characters who aren't parents: Faris cottons to Paul Dano's Nietzsche-obsessed teen and Arkin's heroin-snorting grandpa ("The decision to start taking heroin late seems strangely logical to me"), while Dayton professes kinship with young Olive. "I identify with a 9-year-old girl who wants to be in a beauty pageant," he admits. "Not because I want to be in a beauty pageant, but because I want people to celebrate me. Every person, no matter how old, feels that way sometimes."

Though they hope the movie addresses such subjects with a light hand, Dayton and Faris were both strongly attracted to the social critique in Michael Arndt's script. "We are all about winning in this culture," Dayton says. "All about being the most powerful. We celebrate winners, and we don't even want to talk about losing. Everything's become a contest. Now, it's box office receipts. It's not about film criticism, or let's explore the ideas expressed in a film, or how enjoyable it is. Let's just look at the score."

In essence, Sunshine's characters, particularly Kinnear's motivational speaker, have put so much faith in the American dream that they're powerless to recognize the fact that it's failed them. Kinnear believes so strongly that hard work will eventually pay dividends that he's pushed his family to the brink of ruin. "A lot of people don't notice this, but they're teetering on the edge of financial ruin," Dayton says. "There are a lot of people who have apparent middle-class stature — they have the home and the two cars — but they have debt, and they're on the edge of calamity."

"We're constantly told if you work hard enough, and you try hard enough, you'll get there," Faris says. "People are only out of work because they don't try hard enough." She hopes the movie "celebrates the trying, but doing it for your own pleasure. We told the pageant community this is a story of a family who has this little dog that they love, and it's a mutt, and they don't understand that there are purebreds out in the world. We are all mutts in the world, and hopefully we don't put ourselves into situations where we are judged for not being someone else's idea of perfect."

(sam@citypaper.net)