Fresh, zany comedy about a dysfunctional family on a road trip

Rating: 8/10 (18 August 2006)

Here's a comedic road movie featuring a stereotypical dysfunctional family that is very funny. The predicaments these people find themselves in, and the solutions they come up with, are blatantly far fetched, and the characters are all amusing caricatures of people we've known. There's the sullen teenage son who refuses to speak (Paul Dano, who was so effective in "L.I.E."); the grandfather, a sex obsessed old man who snorts heroin (Alan Arkin); the sensible, long-suffering Mom (Toni Collette, whose acting range keeps on expanding); her suicidal brother (Steve Carell, who played the "40 Year Old Virgin"); the Dad (Greg Kinnear), a failed motivational speaker whose rhetoric about winning and success is at deliciously ironic odds with his own ineptitude. And there is Olive (Abigail Breslin), the plain, plump yet altogether winsome younger daughter, who longs to enter the "Little Miss Sunshine" kids beauty pageant.
The family's journey to the contest, from Arizona to Redondo Beach, forms the main scaffolding on which this wonderfully silly farce is hung. This is the debut feature for the co-directors, whose previous collaborations were on music videos and a six minute short comedy. Here they show considerable skill in evoking uniformly good performances from their acting ensemble. "Sunshine" comes as a welcome breath of fresh air in the dog days of summer. My grade: 7.5/10 B+ (seen on 08/11/06)