A perfect little film, truly fun and surprisingly real

Rating: 9/10 (17 September 2006)

Little Miss Sunshine is a splendidly simple piece of screen stagecraft: it is about characters and a situation that brings them all together, and as only a film can, it takes them on the road. So it's a road picture. About a weird family in New Mexico whose members all get roped into taking a little girl to California to compete in a kind of beauty pageant for little girls. Actually the family isn't so much weird as it is heightened. The father Richard Hoover (Greg Kinnear) is a motivational speaker with a "nine steps" program he's concocted. He's full of confidence and looks like a successful businessman, only he isn't successful; he's a failure. He's no Tony Robbins; he isn't anybody, and he's broke. His 15-year-old son Dwayne (Paul Dana) is a depressed teen who's taken a vow of silence and reads Nietsche all the time; he wants to become a fighter pilot and won't speak till he's assured a place at the Air Force Academy. The wife and mother Sheryl Hoover (Toni Colette) is struggling with the family's problems, but she's not so unusual in herself. The grandpa, dad's father Edwin (Alan Arkin), is a grouchy but spirited eccentric. He's been kicked out of a retirement community for, we must presume, using foul language, advocating promiscuous sex, and taking hard drugs, things he does freely now at home. And a new addition to the household is Richard's brother Frank (Steve Carell), a gay professor and the number one Proust scholar in the United States, who's just attempted suicide over a male student who dumped him in favor of the number two Proust scholar. He's lost his teaching post, had to live in a motel, and been passed over for a MacArthur genius award for Proust scholar number two. The Hoovers rescue Frank from the hospital.
Frank's put in Dwayne's bedroom, where Dwayne writes a message on a pad: DON'T KILL YOURSELF TONIGHT. Olive (Abitgail Breslin) is just a little girl with an enormous enthusiasm for competing in a beauty pageant. She's sweet and has a nice smile and pretty skin but she's ordinary looking and has a tummy and wears big glasses. There isn't much time to get Olive to the pageant in California when she learns she's allowed to compete, and there's no way Richard will permit but to drive in their old VW bus. The bus soon loses its clutch and it can't be fixed, so they have to give it a running start by pushing it or drifting it down a hill.
The element of surprise is important to the pleasure Miss Sunshine can abundantly provide, so it's impossible to reveal how the story progresses from there. All we can tell you is that on the road, the family members don't escape from their problems or their dysfunctions; these continue and have to be confronted. The pageant, when they finally get there at the very last possible minute, is a bit of a shocker for all concerned. It's a sign of how admirable this little film is that one can't sum up its world-view, though one feels it does have one. There's something about families here: their unexpectedness, the way people in them seem more extreme than they are, and turn out to be better than anybody thought. There's gentle fun made of institutions and laws and politicians and the humidification of childhood and the crass culture of "winners" and "losers," but nothing gets in the way of the story, and one's never distracted or bored for a single minute. Minor characters are treated rather cruelly, as is the beauty pageant (it almost makes one gag) and the film's economy also means the omission of some explanatory details. But simply drawn as the characters are (and despite Sunshine's Sundance Festival origins), there's no sense of indie cliché or indie contrivance or indie cuteness here. This is a triumph of minimalism. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who directed, and Michael Arndt, who wrote the screenplay, have put together a beautiful thing. It wouldn't have worked, of course, if the actors hadn't all contributed so ably and evenhandedly to the enterprise. The result is truly fun, and surprisingly real.
P.s. Okay...near-perfect. But in the field of this year's (2006) American films, it's damn-near perfect.