" Hey, I will pull this truck over right now!"

Rating: 7/10 (11 February 2008)

Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris' quirky feature debut, is about a screwball family who take to the road and wondrously finds themselves in this crowd-pleaser.
A brainy blend of farce and heart, this is one of those movies that should leave a permeant smile on your face.
Despite early career success as an outspoken motivational speaker, family patriarch Richard (Greg Kinnear) continues to cling to his "Refuse to lose" philosophy, much to the chagrin of his increasingly annoyed spouse, Sheryl (Toni Collette). Add into the mix a Nietzsche-reading teenage son (Paul Dano) who has taken up a vow of silence until he finds his fate as a fighter pilot; the seven year old, would-be beauty queen Olive ( Abigail Breslin); a horny, heroin-happy grandfather (Alan Arkin) with a penchant for creative profanity; and Frank (Steve Carell) a suicidal genius and Proust scholar still reeling about losing both his male lover and his MacArthur Foundation genius grant -- and the stage is set for a road trip in which sanity is sure to take the back seat.
Nonetheless, the entire film packs an emotional wallop that sure as hell took me by surprise. It also happens to be the funniest movie of the entire year.
I really think Abigail Breslin deserves an Oscar's for her role - there wasn't a scene in the film that wasn't made better by her presence. Olive was really the Little Miss Sunshine, she is the one where all the moving scenes are. She is the one that cheered everyone up, or pulled everyone together. ( For instance, that scene after Dwayne has broken down, and she pulls him back.)
There are so many winning scenes from this film, the dancing scene at the end (they had really overcome all of their problems against each other, and that they stood up for Olive and one another at the end), being pulled over by the cop with the dead body in the trunk, Dwayne's breakdown.
But my favorite is that scene at the diner, where Grandpa and Frank and then Sheryl and Dwayne start taking Olive's ice cream to make her want it again after her father had made her feel so bad for ordering it.