The best road movie in years

Rating: 9/10 (6 March 2007)

Don't be put off by the title. This comedy about a dysfunctional American family, (father, mother, grandfather, gay uncle, son who has taken a vow of silence and the tyke who wants to enter the eponymous contest), is anything but cute. If the feel-good factor goes all the way up to ten, the yuck factor is a pleasing zero. The precedents for this film aren't those appalling Adam Sandleresque comedies about errant dads bonding with kids left on doorsteps but the best American TV comedies going at the moment, such as "Curb Your Enthusism" and "Arrested Development".
The Hoovers are the family in question and they are thrown together at very close quarters when they take to the road in a battered VW van on route to California so their youngest can enter the Little Miss Sunshine contest for which she is being coached by heroin snorting granddad, (Alan Arkin, brilliant). Inevitably things don't go as planned, (the film takes a nicely dark turn about midway through), but in the course of the journey lessons are learned and people whose lives were previously lived in isolation suddenly find themselves bonding in a very unlikely manner. But as I've said, don't let this put you off if, like me, children, animals and the American nuclear family are high on your hate list. Thanks to a cracker of a script by Michael Arndt, nicely observed direction from newcomers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris and a terrific cast, this hits the spot every time.
As the parents at permanent loggerheads, Greg Kinnear and Toni Collette are on career-best form while Steve Carell as the suicidal gay uncle manages to create a completely believable, likable, living, breathing, hurting human being totally devoid of caricature and as the little girl with hopes of finding herself in the big bad world of kiddies' beauty pageants, Abigail Breslin is a revelation. Best of all, not only is "Little Miss Sunshine" the best 'family' orientated comedy in years but it's also a very welcome addition to that recently defunct staple American genre, the road movie. Go see, then go see again.