Take a Trip with Little Miss Sunshine

The quirky comedy of errors Little Miss Sunshine follows the Hoover family on a strange journey. The youngest member of the oddball clan, Olive (Abigail Breslin), has two days to get from her home in Albuquerque to a beauty pageant in California. Her mother Sheryl (Toni Collette) will of course drive her excited daughter but cannot leave behind her own brother Frank (Steve Carell) who is on suicide watch following an attempt. In order to accommodate both of them, Sheryl has to drive the limping family Volkswagen bus, except it has a manual transmission which she can't operate. This leaves the father, aspiring motivational speaker and author Richard (Greg Kinnear), to take the wheel. Grandpa (Alan Arkin) is Olive's pageant choreographer and does not want to miss the show. Teenage brother Dwayne (Paul Dano), who hasn't spoken in nine months, is far too surly to be left on his own.

Naturally the van breaks down and various obstacles arise on the way to California, but the richly drawn characters and the interactions between them are what make this story succeed. The basic plot points certainly are not original; in fact, three events are easily predictable. However, the conflicts within each member of the ensemble as well as their combative yet tender relationships with one another make the viewer want to find out in what way the story leads to its inevitable conclusions.

For example, Richard is obsessed with winning. He intends to inspire Olive to go into the pageant with the mindset that if she isn't going to win, there is no point in competing. Conversely, facing his silent foil Dwayne, Richard transparently pretends to embrace the boy's vow of silence taken ostensibly to help Dwayne win a place at the Air Force Academy. In reality it is obvious his older child frustrates him but to admit this would be, in Richard's mind, to be a loser. In the end though, it is Olive who is in danger of being more damaged by her father's fixation with first place.

Frank believes that he is a loser, despite being the self declared pre-eminent Proust scholar in America. He has even failed at suicide. He has lost his love, his job and finally his number one position in academia. In an extremely uncomfortable scene made worse by the music of Conway Twitty, Frank encounters his lost love miles from home in a gas station. The former professor is reduced to drinking slushies and repeatedly push-starting the van while being babysat by his sister; his lover and his nemesis drive away to a spa in a luxury car. Frank cannot yet see that his life, like Proust's, is most worthwhile during times of struggle.

Ultimately, everyone's main concern is for Olive. The supporting players they meet on the way are almost all horrible people, especially witchy Beth Grant as the pageant official and sleazy publisher Bryan Cranston. The Hoovers realize that if a monster declares you a winner, maybe it's better to lose. And as Grandpa, who has the best lines in the film, says, "A loser is someone who is so afraid of not winning he doesn't even bother to try."

When they finally get to the pageant the other contestants are grotesque parodies of little girls with spray-on tans and painfully sculpted abs. One wonders how the parents of these young actors thought their daughters, who are obviously real pageant contestants, would be portrayed. But if you are a fan of the underdog climactic dance scene a la Dirty Dancing or Napoleon Dynamite you will love Olive's talent performance. Is this movie the year's best alternative to bland, vapid blockbusters and stale remakes? The plot is unfortunately predictable enough for the average American. But the characters will stay with you long after you've seen all five alternate endings. If you watch movies as a student of human nature, this one will serve you well.