▶▶▶ Little Miss Sunshine

Little Miss Sunshine Review

If you are avoiding this film because you think you will see a lame beauty contest for little girls, don't be fooled by the title. While this movie is about a totally dysfunctional family driving about a thousand miles to enter a child in a beauty pageant, the contest serves just as a focus point for the story. The real entertainment lies within the family itself. And what a family it is.

Headed by a man who lectures people to find the winner inside of them, we have a father trying to sell a nine-step theory to success. Unfortunately, he practices what he preaches, much to the dismay of his household, consisting of his foul-mouthed, coke-snorting father; his nervous, chain-smoking wife; his gay, out of work, suicidal brother-in-law; his non-talking, self-disciplined son who claims to hate everyone; and his sweet, loving, seven year old daughter, whose only fault is her addiction to beauty pageants.

Being the most rational of them all, it's of course, the little girl who is responsible for bringing this clan together. She doesn't have that much difficulty achieving this because in spite of their exterior, there is hope for her retched relatives.

Grandpa really loves his family and isn't afraid to tell them at various times in his own way. Mom is a little passive, yet she says the right things at the right time. The uncle is quick to bond with the kids in spite of his own troubles. The big brother is very intelligent and eventually comes around, and Dad somehow manages to get his daughter to the contest on time.

While parts of it reminded me of vacation, the plot was surprisingly unpredictable, and the brilliant cast made these eccentric characters real enough to sustain the most far-fetched situations. It had the right combination of elements: enough drama for conflict, enough sentiment to bond the characters, and lots of humor to carry it through.

Little Miss Sunshine Feature

KINNEAR/ARKIN

Little Miss Sunshine Overview

Take a hilarious ride with the Hoovers, one of the most endearingly fractured families in comedy history.

Father Richard (Greg Kinnear) is desperately trying to sell his motivational success program...with no success. Meanwhile, "pro-honesty" mom Sheryl (Toni Collette) lends support to her eccentric family, including her depressed brother (Steve Carell), fresh out of the hospital after being jilted by his lover. Then there are the younger Hoovers?the seven-year-old, would-be beauty queen Olive (Abigail Breslin) and Dwayne (Paul Dano), a Nietzsche-reading teen who has taken a vow of silence. Topping off the family is the foul-mouthed grandfather (Alan Arkin), whose outrageous behavior recently got him evicted from his retirement home. When Olive is invited to compete in the "Little Miss Sunshine" pageant in far-off California, the family piles into their rusted-out VW bus to rally behind her?with riotously funny results.

Little Miss Sunshine Specifications

Pile together a blue-ribbon cast, a screenplay high in quirkiness, and the Sundance stamp of approval, and you've got yourself a crossover indie hit. That formula worked for Little Miss Sunshine, a frequently hilarious study of family dysfunction. Meet the Hoovers, an Albuquerque clan riddled with depression, hostility, and the tattered remnants of the American Dream; despite their flakiness, they manage to pile into a VW van for a weekend trek to L.A. in order to get moppet daughter Olive (Abigail Breslin) into the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant. Much of the pleasure of this journey comes from watching some skillful comic actors doing their thing: Greg Kinnear and Toni Collette as the parents (he's hoping to become a self-help authority), Alan Arkin as a grandfather all too willing to give uproariously inappropriate advice to a sullen teenage grandson (Paul Dano), and a subdued Steve Carell as a jilted gay professor on the verge of suicide. The film is a crowd-pleaser, and if anything is a little too eager to bend itself in the direction of quirk-loving Sundance audiences; it can feel forced. But the breezy momentum and the ingenious actors help push the material over any bumps in the road.-- Robert Horton

Beyond Little Miss Sunshine