Little Miss Sunshine - heartwarming family corpse heist

Excellent condition DVD of a beautiful peach of a movie that offers redemption to even the most dysfunctional of families

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. 

Synopsis
Picked up after a well-received showing at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE is a low-budget comedy about a family road trip from Albuquerque to California. The story begins when young Olive (Abigail Breslin) is given a shot at the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant, and manages to coerce her family into driving west in their worn-down VW van. Olive's father Richard (Greg Kinnear) heads up the trip, while mother Sheryl (Toni Collette), brother Dwayne (Paul Dano), uncle Frank (Steve Carell), and grandfather (Alan Arkin) all come along for the ride. What follows resembles a modestly-budgeted version of PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES: seemingly endless--and hilarious--mishaps befall the family as they wind their way across the country. Couple this with the witty interplay between a well-drawn set of dysfunctional characters, and that's the LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE formula in a nutshell; all the audience needs to do is sit back and enjoy the ride. The grainy texture of co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris's film may initially startle viewers unaccustomed to the indie film world but it's a testament to the cast and crew's efforts that the limitations imposed on the filmmakers are long forgotten by the end of the film. Any concerns about visual murkiness give way to belly laughs and bemusement as the road trip ends and the beauty pageant begins. Likely to have a broad appeal, Dayton and Faris' film resembles a version of NATIONAL LAMPOON'S VACATION directed with the pithy eye of Todd Solondz (WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE), and it's to the movie's credit that it manages to successfully marry these two seemingly disparate worlds.

In a movie with some of the most beautifully drawn characters I've seen in a movie this year, Little Miss Sunshine proves that being a success in life often comes from deep within the heart and that love can come where you least expect it. It doesn't take long to figure out that dysfunction is the order of the day in Hoover family of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Grandpa (Alan Arkin) is a bitter old hippy who swears profusely and does heroin. Dad (Greg Kinnear) has hopes to publish a dreary nine-step program that asks people to banish their inner losers and be winners. Chubby little Olive (a lovely Abigail Breslin) is determined to become a prepubescent beauty queen, the winner of the Little Miss Sunshine.

Olive's sullen brother (Paul Dano) wants to join the air force and hasn't spoken for nine months and his uncle Frank (Steve Carell) is America's most renowned Proust scholar who has just tried to commit suicide after his boyfriend dumped him.

Leave it to Mom (Toni Collette) the only one of this weird bunch who seems to be grounded yet who gravitates between simmering resentment of her husband and an aching desire to keep her family together. She obviously loves them all but she's too distracted to cook; it's all KFC and Pepsi night after night.

But when the cute owl-eyed Olive finds out that she has a serious chance of winning the Little Miss Sunshine contest in California, no one can decide who should go with her, so the whole Hoover bunch piles into a Volkswagen bus so that Olive can take her shot at the crown.

Thus begins their wacky road trip, which full of trouble, where death lies just around the corner and some family secrets are better left unsaid. Beautifully acted by this superlative ensemble cast - the timing of all six leads is impeccable - Little Miss Sunshine sort of gravitates between black comedy and a kind of benign sadness.

Obviously these are all frustrated people, their lives up until now seem to have peppered with frustrations and disappointments, and none of them have really achieved their dreams, which makes their desire to get Olive to the pageant in time, all the more auspicious.

For all the exaggerations in Michael Arndt's script which has been dashingly directed by the husband-wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris - the movie comes closer to the truth about the way people really live - on the edge of fantasy-driven desperation - than any other film to be released in recent years. Perhaps this is why the film has managed to touch so many hearts.

Obviously, the beat-up and broken down old Volkswagen is a metaphor for this family, who when we first meet them seems to be breaking apart at the seams. Yet they seem to struggle along and cope, even though, as with they're likely their means of transport, only the third and fourth gears are functioning. Their trip is indeed peppered with many disappointments, but in the process they do indeed discover what it really means to be a family.