Abigail Breslin is among the best

Rating: Null/10 (18 December 2006)

LMS is a marriage of the story of dysfunctional family and road movie. It is predictable at times, but not always; the characters you would have generally seen before, but not all of them; part of the movie is realistic, and part of it somewhat offbeat.
Most amazing is Abigail Breslin's portrayal of Olive, a little chubby girl from a simple grass-root family aspiring to be a beauty pageant one day. Among the assemblage of sometimes eccentric adult (or at least adolescent) characters, Olive turns out to be the most sensible and, in a way, most "mature". The greatest challenge is in making this character believable and not going overboard. Little Miss Breslin was pitch perfect, and her performance here deserves to be considered among the best child star performance ever seen on a movie screen.
As the movie rolls along the cross-country journey of this somewhat eccentric but by no means uncommon family in support of Olive's unexpected opportunity for the final Little Miss Sunshine contest, the pace is not all even. There are highs, and not-so-highs (it wouldn't be fair to say "lows"). Toni Collette is consistently excellent as a well meaning, down-to-earth mother who has been putting up with a husband who preaches his 9 steps to success like a Evangelist, with lot of sound and fury but little economic result to show. Said husband is adequately played by Greg Kinnear. Veteran Alan Arkin is one big show-stealer, as the grandfather still obsessed with sex, the idea of it, I mean, and losses no opportunity to offer his advice on the subject so long as his little granddaughter is not within earshot. Steve Carell has a bit of a enigmatic character, the love-sick and suicidal uncle, whose calm and sensible disposition does not appear to project that disturbed soul. Finally, Paul Dano is the typical adolescent youth, Olive's brother.
At various times, the movie can be hilariously funny or soberly through-provoking. In addition to the main characters, it also takes care to show some stereotypes along the way, such as the human beings who seem to be programmed robots, at the hospital as well as at the pageant. Fortunately, not all these incidental characters are ugly. The waitress at a road side restaurant is really nice, totally unlike the one serving Jack Nicholson in "Five easy pieces".