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LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
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I think it was W. C. Fields who observed that the problem with comedies is how to end them (he recommended only two, a pie fight or an extended multi-vehicle chase, and used both in his films). A comedy is a series of laugh moments, and by its nature has an accelerating tempo of both frenzy and absurdity. A family drama, on the other hand, begins as does Little Miss Sunshine, with a serial introduction of each focus character, each of whom by trope is Unique, and hence identifiable by a Homeric attribute. Son Duane (Paul Dano, L.I.E.), angry at the world and reading Nietzsche to feel worse, has taken a vow of silence until his admission to the Air Force Academy because he wants to fly planes. Dad (Greg Kinnear, As Good As It Gets) is a never-say-die inspirational speaker who can't get an audience. His brother Frank is bestowed not one but three epithets: he's the world's foremost Proust scholar; he's gay; and just before the films opens, he has unsuccessfully tried to kill himself.
However depressed he may be, so taciturnly sane is Frank (Steve Carrell, The Forty-Year-Old Virgin, doing an entirely presentable job) that his unseen botched suicide is one of the film's two impossible premises that directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (who work as a team) cleverly shove offstage. The other is that ten-year-old Olive (Abigail Breslin, Signs), plain as a tubby potato but marvelously winsome, against all odds and any viewer's sense of reason, not only was regional runner-up, but also, because the winner cannot serve, is improbably, inconceivably, Little Miss Sunshine of Albuquerque. Herded by frazzled nurturing Mom (Toni Collette, many an Ultra Slimfast removed from Muriel's Wedding), including foul-mouthed powder-sniffing aging hippie Isaac (Alan Arkin, Slums of Beverly Hills), the family must, simply must, pile themselves all six into a yellow-door 1960s' throwback Volkswagen bus and drive the 800 miles to the national Little Miss Sunshine pageant in Redondo Beach, California.
Dispelling the foregoing expository clouds consumes twenty minutes of uneven screen time; fortunately, the film picks up when the bus sets off, confining the family to their designated seats and triggering the absurd and absurdist events that define a comedy road picture.
In its chill regard for Albuquerque and Middle America, Little Miss Sunshine indulges in some of Napoleon Dynamite's coastal condescension toward all things shabby-genteel (as Orwell would have called them) and all desires middlebrow, culminating (of course) in the girls' beauty pageant, where pre-teens with lip gloss and silver bikinis strut and pout.
And then comes Olive's performance, showing us a third way to end a comedy movie.
When allowed to wander, the film is eager to provide subtextual objective correlatives for its message, so the VW bus with all its foibles and troubles becomes an extended metaphor for the Hoovers. "Nobody gets left behind!" bellows Isaac at one mini-crisis. Overt too are the messages about moral versus material success, outer versus inner beauty, and what really glues together a family. Each time LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE threatens to bog down, however, the film (solidly acted throughout, moving and funny and charming by turns) is redeemed by Olive, whose wide-eyed goodness shines through her bug-eyed glasses.