Welcome To Hell

Rating: 3/10 (3 November 2007)

I was totally unfamiliar with this movie, but based on the title I was expecting it to be either an expose or a parody of the whole child beauty contest concept. It accomplishes that, but only in the last twenty minutes or so, after the Hoover family arrives at the Little Miss Sunshine Pageant so that Olive (Abigail Breslin) could compete. To be honest, I found the whole portrayal of the pageant a bit creepy, watching these young girls dressed up like adults and marching around in bathing suits, covered in makeup. I've never actually been to any contest like that, but from pictures I've seen in the media I would imagine that this wasn't far off the mark. Frankly it's sad that such contests exist; sadder still that there are parents who actually let their daughters compete in them.
OK. Enough of the sermon. On to the movie itself. My expectations notwithstanding, this movie wasn't actually about the Little Miss Sunshine Pageant. It was really the story of a completely dysfunctional family struggling to somehow come together during a journey from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach to make Olive's dream come true. And this family was dysfunctional. There's the brother (Paul Dano) who refuses to talk, the gay uncle (Steve Carell) who tried to kill himself, the grandpa (Alan Arkin) who's obsessed with sex and drugs, the father (Greg Kinnear) who's obsessed with success at all costs and the mother (Toni Collette) who - well, I never actually did quite figure her out.The problem as far as I was concerned was that, while they may have been dysfunctional, I didn't find any of these people to be fun, and some of them were downright unlikeable. Brother Dwayne's message to Uncle Frank as he took up residence with the family ("Welcome to Hell") struck me as a totally accurate portrayal of life in that home, and not a bad description of the movie itself.
There were a few good scenes. Smuggling grandpa's body out of the hospital was mildly amusing, and the final moments of the trip to Redondo Beach as the family struggles to figure out how to get to the hotel was a pretty good ride. Grandpa also offered what I thought was a pretty good definition of a loser - "someone who's so afraid of not winning that they don't even try." I can buy that. The final moments of the movie, however - revolving around Olive's dance number at the competition - turned me off completely. It might have succeeded in bringing the family together, but that they would come together around such a grotesque performance for a child that age was pathetic. In general terms, I found very little here that I liked. 3/10