Little Miss Sunshine: A Panacea for the Blues

The Good: Original Plot, Great Cast, Simply Hilarious

The Bad: Can’t Name Any—Can You?

Bottom Line: The story of a quirky family fighting for the American Dream in their yellow microbus is really as good as it gets.

I love this movie. Everything about it—the story, the cast, the music—is fantastic, but most of all it’s real. Written by newcomers Michael Arndt and directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, Little Miss Sunshine is the comical Odyssey of America personified in the story of a family trip.

At the center of the story, we have the Hoovers, a family that doesn’t fit the typical blockbuster mold. And while they’re a far cry from the Cleavers, they offer something much better: delightful dysfunction. Olive (Abigail Breslin) is a 7-year old, aspiring beauty queen and although a bit pudgy with her large-framed glasses, she’s an innocent dreamer. At the start of the movie, we see her staring into the television, studying the crowning of Miss USA and rehearsing for her own moment. When she receives unexpected word she’s eligible for the Little Miss Sunshine Pageant, Olive’s father Richard (Greg Kinnear) decides the family must support Olive’s dreams in spite of the group's reluctance. It’s not that her family doesn't love Olive, but each of them—with their radical personalities—are one breath away from losing their own dreams.

Richard is a motivational speaker and obsessed with winning because he’s never tasted success himself. His wife, Sheryl (Toni Collette), can’t hold her crazy family together and Richard’s father, Edwin (Alan Arkin), was kicked out of his nursing home for sleeping around and snorting heroin. Olive’s brother, Dwayne (Paul Dano) wants to be a test pilot, but hates his family and has assumed a vow of silence until he’s accepted to flight school. And to top it all off, Sheryl’s brother, Frank (Steve Carrell), who recently attempted suicide when his lover left him, now lives with the family.

Their internal conflicts be what they may, the eclectic gang of six hits the road for California because they can’t afford to travel any other way. Crammed in their aging VW Microbus, family tensions play out along the journey and they are wrought with personal setback—as well as car trouble. Richard loses an important break for his speaking business, Frank runs into his ex-lover, and each member either suffers or is painfully reminded of their failures. But the importance of their struggle is that it reveals how much they need each other, an ideal that is most prominently displayed when the van breaks down and the family must push it until it kicks into second gear so they can pile in.

I won’t spoil the film, but I love that it's refreshingly fresh and most of all, genuine. These are real people with real problems and you can feel their pain because we've all been in similar, albeit less quirky, situations. No matter how much effort, time, or energy you put into a cause, sometimes it just doesn’t work out. That is the plight of the Hoovers and in many ways it’s the story of America. We live in a fantasy world where we believe anything is possible, but more often than not, we fail. And while the outcomes are beyond our control, what we can govern is our response. When we realize this, we understand that our moments of despair clarify who we are and what matters to us. And to the Hoovers—it’s family.

We figure this out, not because the Hoovers tell us, but because they show us. The cast is fantastic and the characters they build in only a few hours is astonishing. Kinnear, with his tucked in pastel shirts, is the classic Type A neurotic and Collette plays the tired, trying-to-make-it work mother with such grace. Dano, who barely speaks during the first half the film is fantastic expressing his resentment simply through facial cues and body language. Equally impressive is Steve Carrell, who takes a step back from his more overtly comic role in The Office, for darker humor. Playing a scholar, he gives you that professorial feel of an individual with plenty of intellect, but little knowledge of how to manage his own life. And perhaps the best performance is young Breslin, who makes her debut as a convincing, innocent girl, oblivious to all that is wrong in the world. Overall, the cast is outstanding. Coupled with the dramatic, yet subtle tunes of Devotchka, this is a gem of a film that shows us that success is defined by the individual, not society. As Dwanye so eloquently puts it near the end of the film, “Do what you love and fuck the rest.”