Comedy drama about a horribly dysfunctional family

Rating: Null/10 (3 April 2014)

Little Miss Sunshine is one of those comedies where most of the time you feel like you shouldn't be laughing at it. It creates this unclean feeling in you yet it's clearly supposed to be entertainment.
It all starts with the characters. You have the father (Greg Kinnear), an unsuccessful motivational speaker. The brother (Paul Dano), who has taken up a vow of silence, following the teachings of Nietzsche. The uncle (Steve Carell), a suicidal gay man, who used to be an appreciated professor. The grandfather (Alan Arkin), who cares little about anything but porn. And lastly the eponymous Little Miss Sunshine (Abigail Breslin), a pudgy nerdy beauty pageant applicant. Only the mother (Toni Collette) is in any way normal, which is good, because she provides much needed balance to this mix of weird and unsettling characters.
Little Miss Sunshine works because and despite of its crazy character largely because it has such great actors capable of pulling it off. Steve Carell and Alan Arkin especially shine in their roles and manage to provide many of the best jokes. But because the characters are so brutally broken, it'd be hard to call Little Miss Sunshine just a comedy. It is that, don't get me wrong, there are laughs to be had, but there are also really dark and depressing scenes... which are then played for laughs. The end result is something of a mix between the two genres and it adds an additional layer of depth to otherwise relatively normal road trip comedy.
I'd also dare to guess that the humour is not for everyone. Most of the jokes are somewhat mean-spirited in nature or they laugh at things that in a drama would be easy tear-jerkers. Olive's performance at the beauty pageant near the end especially exemplifies this idea. It's sort of a train wreck of comedy scenes. It's so horrible, so wrong, but you can't look away. And the more you look at it, the funnier it becomes. And that perfectly sums up Little Miss Sunshine.