Comedy has charm, humor, and is a commercial product.

Rating: 6/10 (1 January 2008)

We are introduced to the Hoover family: the mother (Toni Collette), the achievement-obsessed father (Greg Kinnear), the vulgar grandfather (Alan Arkin), the depressed teen-aged son suffering from elective mutism (Paul Dano), the scholarly, gay uncle who is recovering from a suicide attempt (Steve Carrell), and the cutely plain little girl who wants to be a candidate for Little Miss Sunshine (Abigail Breslin).
"A family of losers," someone calls them. (Well, they are, after all, the Hoovers.) Actually, once we get the introductions over with, it isn't a promising picture. This is the way TV situation comedies are planned -- throw together a group of dissimilar nuts into one house and have them stumble all over each other while making wisecracks. If you try to stretch it out to feature length you're liable to wind up with Chevy Chase in a Griswold family vacation movie, with a dead body strapped to the roof. (This one has a dead body in the back of the VW microbus.) The little girl, Olive, wins a crack at the title of Little Miss Sunshine in Redondo Beach, California, an apt location, but the whole family must pile into the VW and drive the 800 miles from Albuquerque and must arrive the day after tomorrow by 3PM to register. All sorts of things go wrong that cause delays -- surprise! Not only does gramps die in his sleep, but the local hospital's "bereavement counselor," after offering them her condolences in a practiced voice, begins handing them thousands of pages of forms that have to be filled out. What's more, they can't just transport gramp's remains across the state line because that involves the personal endorsement of the Federal Trade Commission and would be a violation of the Mann Act. I just made that up, but I want to suggest that if the Hoover family follows the rules, Olive's entry in the contest is forfeit. So, the Little Miss Sunshine contest being of paramount importance, they don't follow the rules. Instead, they smuggle the remains out of a hospital window and stuff it into the back of the bus in a scene that lacks the laughs that the smuggling of a dead body ought to have.
Actually, there aren't many laughs in the film, although it is replete with incidents that generate smiles. As in any successful sitcom, the characters' quirks are milked for all the laughs that can be gotten from them. At breakfast in a café, for instance, Olive orders waffles a la mode. Kinnear, his eye ever on the game, explains to her that ice cream is made from cream and that it has a lot of fat and that beauty contest winners are -- well, would you call them fat or skinny? Olive replies doubtfully, "Skinny?" Kinnear smiles down at her. Smart kid.
The beauty contest must have provided the writers with a challenge. The other contestants look like porcelain dolls. They are of various races but share bulbous foreheads, bouffant hair styles, lots of make up, great big false lashes, pasted-on smiles full of capped teeth, flashy outfits of sequins and bangles, and a way of prancing around on stage while shaking their little tushies, to the delight of a burly, bearded guy smothered in tattoos who appears to represent the pedophiles in our midst. Well, Olive is a nice kid, but she's no beauty and her talent is modest compared to the yodelers and the gymnasts.
Does Olive win? It would defy our suspension of disbelief. Does she lose? What kind of happy ending would that be? So the writers plump for having her get on the stage in front of these professional stage mothers and do a kind of raucous strip tease, using some lascivious steps taught to her by her degraded grandfather. Some members of the audience get up and leave in disgust. They prefer a more disguised pornography. The bailiffs, or the guards, or the corrections officers, or the civilian contractors rush to remove Olive from the stage. BUT -- the whole family runs on the stage, beats off the agents of social control, and JOINS IN OLIVE'S DANCE! Not only do the concepts of "winning" and "losing" become irrelevant, but Olive has brought the whole family together again! Let's hear it for Olive! The movie has its moments of desperation. At one point, the horn of the VW begins bleating by itself. But on the whole there are enough laughs to keep a family entertained. The kids aren't likely to get the mostly unsuccessful gags about homosexuality (or maybe they will) and they'll surely miss the references to Proust and Nietzsche, but they'll appreciate gramp's filthy mouth and the sillier jokes. It ends on a warm, up-lifting note. I wish it had ended with a capper of a comedy caper.