Unable to leave Frank unsupervised and with Dwayne particularly unhappy at the prospect of spending extended time cooped up with his family in a VW bus, the bickering brood hit the highway for Olive's date with destiny.What follows is a checklist of just about every road movie cliché you might expect. When the winner of the California contest is disqualified - "something involving diet pills" - she has two days to make it to Redondo Beach for the pageant finals. While visiting her cousins in California on spring break, Olive had been the runner-up in a regional competition for the Little Miss Sunshine pageant and has been practicing a routine devised by Grandpa for a local Little Miss Chili Pepper contest. (Add a nun, a rabbi and a duck to this menagerie and I suspect you've got the makings of a good dirty joke.)
Her stressed-out mother, Sheryl (Toni Collette), is coping with all this madness and then has to bring home her brother, Frank (Steve Carell), a gay Proust scholar who has attempted suicide. Her Grandpa (Alan Arkin) is a foul-mouthed curmudgeon (never seen that before) who keeps himself entertained by snorting heroin (ah, there's the indie twist), getting tossed from the retirement home as a result. Her father, Richard (Greg Kinnear), is a struggling motivational speaker - there's some irony for you - who is desperate to land a book deal for his nine-step "Refuse to Lose" program.
Her sullen teenaged brother, Dwayne (Paul Dano), is a Nietzsche-obsessed adolescent who is observing a vow of silence until he enters the Air Force Academy - a combination that is as likely as a teen reading Das Kapital while blasting Ted Nugent 8-tracks. While it's natural to root for the scrappy underdog, what's puzzling about Little Miss Sunshine is how warmed-over and formulaic it is for being this alleged dark indie "dramedy." Strip away the self-consciously artsy touches and what's left is a modest film that's not so much bad as it is Little Miss Ain't All That.Olive Hoover (Abigail Breslin, Signs) is a chubby, beauty contest-obsessed, seven-year-old from Albuquerque in a dysfunctional family that has an abundance of "diss" and darn little "fun" in it. Picked up for a reported $10 million dollars, it went on to nearly universal critical acclaim and $86 million at the box office. Public Enemy once rapped, "Don't believe the hype." And in the case of the wildly over-praised Sundance hit Little Miss Sunshine, these are wise words to live by.
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