Reviewed - Little Miss Sunshine: APPROPRIATELY for an entertainment that takes place largely in a Volkswagen bus, Little Miss Sunshine, whose merry title becomes somewhat less ironic as events progress, motors through cinematic territory familiar since the late 1960s.
The characters exhibit singular eccentricities in the manner of the various nuts that decorated, in those times, the films of Hal Ashby (and, more recently, any number of Sundance-friendly independent films). Most of the recognisable tropes of the road movie - diligently and imaginatively worked through here - also date from that culturally fecund era.
Never mind. Little Miss Sunshine, though less original than it believes itself to be, is a delight from grim beginning to cheekily celebratory end. Each of the characters' quirks is amusing enough to excuse the fact that it can be expressed in one terse clause, and the script's inclination towards common decency should overwhelm the weariest cynic.
The picture details a trip taken by the amusingly disturbed Hoover family from their home in New Mexico to Redondo Beach in Los Angeles. As is often the case in such tales, the women are that bit less deranged than the male members of the clan. Alan Arkin's grandfather takes heroin and swears. Steve Carell's gay uncle, America's second most prominent Proust scholar, has recently attempted suicide following the unhappy termination of an affair with a graduate student. The paterfamilias, whose smug prissiness nicely suits Greg Kinnear, is proving an abject failure as a self-help guru.
Packed into that unreliable yellow van, enjoying a limited degree of harmony imposed by mom Toni Collette, the Hoovers set out to transport Olive, the family's youngest member, to the final of a juvenile beauty pageant. The cast is on consistently top form, but none is so good as the charming Abigail Breslin, who grants Olive ingenuous charm and spontaneous wisdom.
Directed with hands-off ease by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, hitherto prominent video directors, and featuring sparky dialogue by Michael Arndt, another feature debutante, Little Miss Sunshine is one of those rare films whose flaws prove to be almost as engaging as its strengths. Do Proust experts really get to drive Jaguars? Could such a family really not be aware of the grotesque nature of junior beauty pageants?
Such anomalies generate laughter and intrigue and, in doing so, help turn Little Miss Sunshine into the quirk-com hit of the season.
