Portrait of an American Family

Rating: 9/10 (2 March 2007)

For about the first three quarters of Little Miss Sunshine I expected that it was going to be another highly overrated sleeper like Almost Famous or The Royal Tenenbaums, but by the time the movie ended I was about ready to stand up and cheer. Steve Carell has a highly subdued role as a suicidal intellectual, and Greg Kinnear and Toni Collette take on roles of a highly dysfunctional married couple with a couple of kooky kids.
(spoilers ahead) Kinnear's character is struggling to sell a 9-step self help book, which may have failed partly because he can't even help himself, let alone his family, and at the last minute their daughter is granted a place in the Little Miss Sunshine competition in beautiful Hermosa Beach, California. It's clear that she could never win such a superfluous and superficial competition, but her excitement is infectious so the family drops everything and piles into their old, beat-up VW bus (really, is there any other kind of VW bus other than old and beat up?) to drive in close quarters across a few states together. The ultimate dysfunctional road trip.
Along the way they suffer every hardship imaginable, some hilarious and some just disturbing (although even those ultimately hilarious), but the movie really gets going once the family gets to the beauty competition. I am reminded of David Guest's outstanding film Best in Show, which brilliantly lampoons dog grooming competitions, or whatever they're called, and the nutty people that participate in them.
Remember Shirley Temple in her 1934 short film War Babies? Well, probably not since you haven't seen it, but it is a parody of the stereotypical romantic war film, in which 4-year-old Shirley plays a bar girl of some sort, cavorting around the bar set in a diaper and shaking her hips in ways that would make the grandpa in Little Miss Sunshine blush. Most of the girls participating in the beauty competition in this movie give performances that are at least as disturbingly sexual as Shirley did 70 years earlier, and it is no less sad now that their parents are sitting in the crowd cheering them on, and those are exactly the people that are so brilliantly lambasted by the film.
I have to admit that I have never been to any kind of beauty competition, human or otherwise, but I do know that there are people that completely devote themselves to these high-superficiality contests, putting external appearance on a pedestal and either unaware or completely indifferent to the very existence of personality or intellect, so I really think it's great to see such a cleverly made film whose main purpose is to point out how nutty these people are! Whether you are interested in beauty contests at all, I should think that this movie should make you feel that they should be made illegal, at least the ones for kids, and will keep you entertained all along as well.