A Movie That Will Make You Proud to Be Ordinary

Rating: 10/10 (18 September 2006)

Much of "Little Miss Sunshine" shouldn't work, yet almost all of it does.
One of the best ensemble casts in recent memory delivers this outrageous material with a tremendous amount of heart and conviction and, as a result, a screenplay that threatens to stretch the bounds of credibility comes across as believable and achingly poignant. The characters are given such strong motivations for their actions that everything they do and say feels utterly plausible, even when the film itself threatens to teeter into Faulknerian Southern Gothic crossed with National Lampoon's "Vacation." The writers, director and cast stubbornly refuse to allow us any tidy character assessments. Therefore, we see the brittle and harsh side of Toni Collette's otherwise loving mom; the warm, charming and please-like-me vulnerability of Greg Kinnear's otherwise smarmy and nearly intolerable dad; the intellectual pompousness and snobbery that peeks its head through Steve Carell's otherwise emotionally wounded suicide case; and the affectionate patriarch lurking behind the otherwise gruff and offensive exterior of Alan Arkin's grandfather, whose greatest crime may be that he's too honest.
"Little Miss Sunshine" hands over this motley cast of characters and lets us glory in their imperfections, and through doing so helps us feel better about our own. As the movie points out, perfection isn't possible, and the aggressive pressure in American culture to achieve it is only making people miserable about failing at something they never had a chance of succeeding at in the first place. The movie is so warm hearted though, that its ultimate lesson isn't a downer. At the end, this close-knit family realizes that they're proud to be ordinary, and dammit, so am I.
Grade: A+