Clichéd W/ Some Funny Scenes & Cameo Characters

Rating: 7/10 (28 February 2007)

This movie came highly recommended by a friend in the movie industry whose own tastes run to foreign, esoteric and intellectual. He described it as one of the best movies he's seen recently. With this in mind, I was very excited about seeing the film and, also, expecting an awful lot. I was disappointed.
First, the entire film hinges on an untenable postulate: an adorable, chubby, sweet, kind little girl from Alberquerque (Olive, played magnificently by Abigail Breslin) has won, by default, a beauty pageant and been invited to compete in the Little Miss Sunshine competition in California. Her coach is her grandfather, a heroin snorting, randy old man with a penchant for loud shirts, leather vests and T&A magazines. The rest of her family has never seen her routine and has had no part of designing her hair, make-up and costumes.
The Hoover family is entirely dysfunctional but each of the individual members is engaging in his or her strangeness. Indeed, these idiosyncratic characters are the movies strength and salvation. My favorite was Dwayne, the 15 year old son who is fascinated with Nietzche, has taken a vow of silence until he attains his objective of getting into the Air Force Academy to become a jet fighter pilot and is, at heart, a great kid.
The family speeds toward California in a decrepit bright-yellow VW bus that is used for rather clichéd comic purposes, including attracting a clichéd, potbellied, red-neck motorcycle cop who ultimately lets them off when he finds grandpa's T&A magazines in the back of the bus. I won't tell you what he, bigoted redneck stereotype that he is, fails to see right before his eyes in the process.
In California the Hoovers find that the pageant is really for air-brushed, powdered, big-haired 7 year olds dressed to look like Las Vegas showgirls (this was realism, not humor). The audience of the pageant is filled with other-America stereotypes, including one 400 pounder woman and a tattooed biker who is a follower of these shows and clearly comes for the bumps and grinds.
Then the ending! How merry. What a charming moral (I hear the director defended the stale jump-start-the-bus bits as a symbol of the family pulling together). Gag me with a spoon. But I guess this is Hollywood's vision of wholesome.