Fresh, fun and meaningful

Rating: 8/10 (16 March 2011)

A road movie about a dysfunctional family trying to take the little girl to a beauty pageant interstate. An incredibly fresh, witty and enthralling movie with freak and quirky characters, brilliant dialogs, great performances by all actors, and a story that is never boring.
I want to highlight four elements that make of this film a great one.
The first one, is that a dysfunctional and somewhat/sometimes freak family is depicted in a non-judgmental way. They epitomize the dysfunctions that most families, called normal have. The viewer feels that the family is freaky, but at the same time as normal. There is a lot of empathy in the way the movie shows them to the viewer.
The second element is a subtle criticism of the ideal of the American dream and of the self-help tools addressed to turn anybody into a famous rich person. The character of the father -so well played by Greg Kinnear- epitomizes the bullshit that these messages can have, pushing us to fight for success no matter what, following recipes that usually lead to failure and fracas, for which they don't provide any recipe. The mother --played by Toni Collete- is instead the voice of common sense, and a much more successful person in that regard.
The third element is the very cleaver non non-confrontational criticism of child beauty pageants. The script poses a rhetorical question, what happens to the little girl going to the beauty pageant being the answer,one with which the viewer agrees without hesitation. The question is, what is freakier, a beautiful child sexually dressed wearing slutty make up who poses and moves in an adult way, or an innocent girl who sings and dances to a raunchy song that she does not understand?
In fact, it is what happens to the little freaky girl what shows that the family is not that freaky after all, and that appearances are always deceiving. The family does not push the girl into the contest, does not force her to dress or behave in a certain way, does not dress her as little prostitute, does not expect anything from here, just supports her the whole way, even when everybody turns against her. The other parents, the "normal" ones, appear as real freaks after all, projecting their frustrated dreams and aims into their little kids, tools to mask their personal failure. All of the sudden, the dysfunctional family is just normal, warm and caring, the others just the opposite. Not that dysfunctional after all.
Finally, the movie gives us so many iconic images that imprint our retinas with strength -- The pushing of the van and the music, the girl singing "super freak", the escape from the hospital, among many others.
The movie could have been pretentious, obscure, too simplistic, unclear, but it is nothing of this. You have a great time at watching this movie, but it makes you think. What else do you want?!