The best comedy of the year!

Rating: 9/10 (4 September 2006)

When I first saw the trailer for Little Miss Sunshine in front of Thank You for Smoking I thought to myself "Awww that looks like cornball hell". But to my surprise an enormous amount of absolutely glowing reviews came pouring in praising the film. This time you can trust the critics. Little Miss Sunshine is not only the most hysterically funny and original comedy of the year, it's also one of the very best and most delightful films I've seen all year long. That's right, it truly is. This innocence and carefree little flick serves up a great dish of bittersweet drama and plenty of quirky laughs. If the Academy Awards have any real value left to them this film would at the very least get a Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay; its proof that movies can still be funny and original without having to rely entirely on potty humor and tasteless sex jokes. This is one of those underrated films that should get more attention, and hopefully more people will go and check it out.
This dramedy about a super dysfunctional family revolves around one little girl named Olive; an innocence oddball child with aspirations to win a beauty pageant named "Little Miss Sunshine". One look at her and you think to yourself, "Well that ain't happenin' anytime soon." Abigail Breslin (the little girl from Signs) is outstanding as Olive, and her performance is a real winner for such a young actress (Look out Dakota!), but this film isn't necessarily all about one great performance, instead we get six! Toni Collette and Greg Kinnear play Sheryl and Richard, the mother and father of this gang of misfits, which includes not only Olive, but her older brother Dwayne, who aspires to be a pilot and has taken a vow of silence until he achieves his goal. And then there's Frank, Olive's gay and suicidal uncle, played by funnyman Steve Carell. Carell, whose ability to whip up laughs in last year's The 40-Year-Old Virgin, keeps himself in a constant downtrodden mood and never seems to try too hard to get laughs, but he gets 'em anyway. He could have stolen the spotlight easily, but he doesn't. And rounding out the family is Alan Arkin as the grumpy and horny grandpa named, well honestly, it's just "Grandpa". Whose complains about getting old and snorts heroine to deal with his life. All the performances are equally great, no one really seems to outshine anybody else; much like a real family they work together and together they make one of the most entertainingly fun and enjoyable dysfunctional families I've seen on the big screen in quite a long time.
The majority of the film is the family packing into their busted up and literally falling apart VW minivan and traveling hundreds of miles to get Olive to the pageant on time. Sounds like a simple premise, but to anyone whose seen a road trip comedy you can bet that the journey will take plenty of hilarious detours, and the best part of Little Miss Sunshine is that most of the detours you won't see comin'; when you think you know exactly where the joke is headed it immediately takes a sharp turn and goes somewhere else entirely. The amazing script by first time writer, Michael Arndt, is full of tender and soft moments, but the film never gets sappy or corny, and instead sometimes stings with quirky humor and very deep insights into the joy of life, family, and the misery of the pressure to win and the bitter taste of losing. The great thing about the film is how it's handled and how perfectly balanced it is; it never becomes predictably trite or overly sentimental.
Little Miss Sunshine is a delightful little surprise that rides a roller coaster of emotions from sad, to heat-warming to hysterically funny and enjoyable. This isn't exactly a "family movie". It's rated a mild R, for some language and sexual humor and brief drug use. But this is such a charming and entertaining film you hardly seem to notice the R rating. So if you're looking for something refreshingly original and equally funny and enjoyable and you're sick of shallow entertainment like Snakes on a Plane or Beerfest and looking for something that'll put a nice big 'ol smile on your face I'd highly recommend rushing out to the theater and seeing Little Miss Sunshine, even if you have to give your car a push start to make it to the theater, it's worth it.