A charming, if predictable, indie experience

Rating: 8/10 (22 August 2006)

It's the elephant in the room that no one ever talks about: the little girl with the dreams of beauty pageant glory has a snowball's chance of winning. She's cute in her own way, sure, but hardly up to the standards of appearance expected in those contests that have done so much to creep us all out over the years. Actually, this movie couldn't have come out at a better (or is it worse?) time; the recent return to prominence of the JonBenet Ramsey case makes the overly-made-up hopefuls all the creepier. They sort of look like the munchkins in "Wizard of Oz," only they don't have candy, or a coroner, and they don't seem to be in on the joke.
The other characters are pretty much off the shelf: the melancholy teen who hates EVERYONE; the contented, if ribald, grandfather who we can all guess won't be around for the closing credits; the suicidal intellectual; the beleaguered homemaker. Toni Collette plays the part well, keeping her hopes up without being unrealistic in her expectations, but there aren't a lot of notes for her to hit that we haven't heard before. Paul Dano's character has given up speaking, but from the moment we meet him its a pretty fair bet that he'll give up that promise by the end, and we can generally guess how it's going to happen. Greg Kinnear's failure of a motivational speaker is perhaps the most predictable of the lot, as he begins by belittling and offending everyone he encounters, and finally comes around to...well, he comes around to something, I suppose. Too bad grandpa wasn't around for it.
Still, "Little Miss Sunshine" manages to go to a lot of unexpected places, and its sense of comic timing is spot-on. Witness: the broken car horn that manages to go off at the perfect moment, or the stash of pornography that gives just the wrong impression not once, but twice. There are a lot of good laughs here: honestly, it's pretty hard to take those dolled-up tykes in the climactic pageant seriously. Some of grandpa's humor is pretty forced, but this little film has a lot of smarts, and a lot of heart.