Definitely a ray of sunshine

Rating: 9/10 (2 December 2006)

This wry, subversive and amusing take on the American family and child beauty contests is 100 minutes of sheer enjoyment. It's also proof of the saying that good art does not come from nowhere. The directors, husband and wife team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, have never made a feature movie before, yet have had 20 years experience making commercials and MTV programs. There is no really big-name star but the actors are mostly very experienced (and well chosen) - even 9 year old Abigail Breslin as Olive is an experienced child actor. The production history was convoluted and the picture came very close to not being made on several occasions. The result is an almost perfectly realized comedy with hardly a surplus line which leaves a warm afterglow in audiences.
There were dysfunctional fictional American families before the Hoovers and the Hoovers themselves are not particularly freaky. It's actually seven-year old Olive who wants to be a beauty queen. Mum (Tony Collette) is pre-occupied with the welfare of her brother Frank (Steve Carell) a Proust scholar who recently attempted suicide after losing his lover and his job. Dad (Greg Kinnear), a struggling motivational counseller, doesn't spot Olive on his emotional radar until he sees her as a way of proving the effectiveness of his nine-points to success program. Crude old Grandpa (Alan Arkin) is supportive, and does some coaching, in between snorting heroin. Teenage brother Dwayne (Paul Dano), aspiring USAF pilot immersed in a Nietzschean silence, is an unwilling passenger on the VW Microbus to the grand contest at Redondo Beach, California. So we have a family comedy, a road movie, and a sharp dig at the American obsessions with youth and success, not to mention the authoritarian bureaucracies that infest the land of the free.
Despite the fun in getting there, via the interstates, gas stations and highway patrols, the climax of the movie is undoubtedly the pre-teen beauty pageant. Here the directors managed to persuade real contestants in real such contests to do their stuff, and some of it is frighteningly professional  at least one gymnastic act by an 8 year old would qualify for the Olympics. Olive's act is not in the same class, but she brings the house down nonetheless, to the great discomfort of officialdom. Needless to say she doesn't win, but the family walks (or rather runs) away together, more united than before.
Pre-teen beauty contests are an ugly business and the murder case of Jo-Benet Ramsay was a reminder of the unwholesomeness of it all, but the film-makers here play it straight  what you see is what the fans get - and you can form your own view about what these contests tell you about American popular culture and mores. But you needn't worry about the message  there are enough pure laughs here to justify the price of admission.