New spin on cliché characters

Rating: 9/10 (27 August 2006)

Please go see Little Miss Sunshine. That is all. Oh? You want more info? OK. Umm. It's really good. Is that enough? It has Steve Carell in it. Will that compel you to see it? Oh, alright, I see you need more convincing.
Little Miss Sunshine is a movie that could easily fall into cliché, but surprisingly does not. At first glance, we've seen families like this before. There's the sullen, detached teenager. There's the crotchety grandfather, with a soft spot only for his granddaughter, Olive. There's the uptight, overly critical dad and finally, there is the frazzled mom trying to hold the family together. But what's so fresh about this movie is that it takes these (on the surface) cliché characters and throws them into very non-cliché situations.
The title of the movie refers to the name of a little girls beauty pageant in which Olive is competing. Whether or not Olive wins the pageant, she is Little Miss Sunshine; let's be clear on that. She is full of light and hope and totally without guile. She is quite lovable, but in fact, by the end of the movie, you will most likely have fallen in love with the entire family. Not one of them is without fault, but not one is without redeeming quality.
Running parallel with the beauty pageant storyline is the addition of a house guest. Uncle Frank attempted suicide and needs a place to stay while he recuperates. Frank (wonderfully played by Carell) is a preeminent Proust scholar (as he reminds everyone throughout the movie) who was dumped by his grad assistant/boyfriend for the second-most renowned Proust scholar. Frank also loses his job and his apartment resulting from a series of murky events. When the family must travel from Albuquerque to Southern California for the pageant, Frank tags along for the road trip from hell.
I don't want to give too much away, so I'll stop here. But will say thisI laughed a lot, I cried a little, and yes, I learned something too. In my book, it can't get much better than that.