Emitting rays of sunshine through dark characters

Rating: 10/10 (3 September 2006)

The family of seven-year-old Olive(cherubic,sweet and real Abigail Breslin)decide that they are all going to pull together and take her to California to compete in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant. As seemingly normal as this seems,this is anything but.
For starters,the family in question is a fragmented pastiche of individuals:dad Richard(Greg Kinnear,slowly evolving into "Every Dad")is a motivational speaker whose career success seems to fly in the face of the programs he so fiercely subscribes,mom Sheryl(Toni Collette,another great performance)works constantly and rarely has much time to spend with her kids,older brother(step-brother)Dwayne(Paul Dano,sullen)has designs on Air Force flight school,reads Nietzsche,hates(almost)everyone and hasn't spoken in a year and the Granddad(Alan Arkin,for whom I smell a possible award nomination)is a cantankerous War vet who spends most of his days teaching his beloved granddaughter pageant routines and snorting heroin. Enter Uncle Frank(Steve Carell,for whom I'm smelling another award nom), a love-sunken professor--a Proust scholar--who just survived a suicide attempt and has the dead,sunken eyes of someone whose found little reason to live. They may all be vastly different,bickering,irritable and,at one level or another,incompatible,but they are all in the endeavor to get little Olive to the pageant,and nothing is going to stop them.
Directed by Jonathan DAyton and Valerie Faris,this movie may have dark characters and less than sunny lives,but the fact that they are still able to emit humor and real pathos make them humorous and strangely reassuring. The film is paced naturally,the revelations that are made are neither overly dramatic nor unremarkable and the writing by Michael Arndt,make this a joy to watch and get involved with,from the odd beginning to the somewhat unpredictable ending. This may be giving something away about this film,but this film,after I saw it,reminded me a fair amount of Napoleon Dynamite. I'm saying no more on that.
Possibly the best movie of any sort this summer!I don't know if there was intended irony or truth(or both)in the title,but either way it works. I highly recommend it.