Little Miss Sunshine

I saw this movie in the theater when it came out last year. Big Steve Carell fan. He plays "America's Leading Marcel Proust Scholar" (or maybe America's #2 Proust scholar). I have not read more than a few pages of Proust, and only in English at that, so I know very little about him or his work.

Christopher Hitchens, who is kind of a mini-idol to me, once wrote that Proust should not be attempted until one is at least forty. His reasoning being that "The Search for Lost Time" is a book that can only be truly appreciated after you've experienced life -- the ups and the downs and everything in between. Based on that recommendation alone, I have both held off reading any more of Proust, and also resolved to make a date with him on October 17th, 2012.

Back to "Little Miss Sunshine." It's funny how you see things in a movie the second time that you missed on the first viewing. I watched this on HBO today and this time it was the scene on the pier outside the hotel that stuck with me.

Steve Carell's character is talking to his nephew about Proust. Here's a bit of the exchange:

Frank: "Y'ever hear of Marcel Proust?"
Dwayne: "He's the guy you teach?"
Frank: "Yeah. French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love
affairs. Gay. Spent twenty years writing a book almost no one reads. But he
was also probably the greatest writer since Shakespeare. Anyway, he gets down
to the end of his life, he looks back and he decides that all the years he suffered
-- those were the best years of his life. Because they made him who he was.
They forced him to think and grow, and to feel very deeply. And the years he
was happy? Total waste. Didn't learn anything."

Small comfort maybe, when things don't seem to be going your way. But it does sound essentially ... right.

“...and love has such a need to find some justification for itself, some guarantee of duration, in pleasures which without it would have no existence and must cease with its passing.”
-Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way