A "Modest winner"

Rating: 10/10 (28 August 2006)

In an age of Wedding Crashers, 40 Year Old Virgins, and Talledega Nights, it's refreshing to see an intelligent comedy from which we get the sense that the players didn't have more fun making it than we do watching it.
Little Miss Sunshine is a "Modest Winner" (the New Yorker) that takes the paradigm of a dysfunctional family to it's limit. Richard Hoover (Greg Kinnear) is the Dad who's too wrapped up in the world of his own 9 step program to realize that family problems do extend beyond the reach of his self-help pyramid. Alan Arkin plays Richard's dad, the Heroin addict recently kicked out of his assisted living community, and dance coach to 7 year old Olive (Abigail Breslin), the family's pageant-winning daughter. Olive's brother, Dwayne, is a 15 year old Nietzche disciple who has taken a vow of silence until he is admitted to the Air Force academy (is it just me, or does the combination of Nietzche and the Air Force not seem to match?) Holding the family together, or at least trying to, is the wife/mother/realist (Toni Collette) who will stop at nothing to at least put a bucket of chicken on the table. Her brother Frank (Steve Carell), is a suicidal academic and the nation's leading Proust scholar recently taken in by the family.
While all this might seem like a cinematic recipe for disaster (a la most other road trip movies), the script works, and the actors, particularly Arkin and Carell, deliver. The family piles into the old VW Microbus (of course) and heads off for the Little Miss Sunshine competition in California, and the movie gets rolling. Kinnear is the epitome of the self-involved Dad, and even the physical humor of the movie is not crass, but remains fairly creative. The movie is beset by some heavier emotional content at times, but these moments are not cheap, and do a nice job of adding to the films sincerity. It's nice to see a comedy the doesn't rely on Vince Vaughan or the Wilson brothers for laughs, and that targets an audience other than hormone-rich high-schoolers. Little Miss Sunshine, a refreshing independent comedy, is for sure a "Modest Winner."