Greg Kinnear! Toni Collette! Alan Arkin! STEVE CARRELL! Really, do we have any other reasons NOT to watch Little Miss Sunshine?
Indie films have always featured dysfunctional families, but they couldn’t be more endearing than the one featured in Little Miss Sunshine, a road trip movie that is really a richly-layered parable of acceptance and consumerist exploitation.
Introducing the paragon of America’s Dysfunction: There’s the father, Richard Hoover (Kinnear), one of those self-help gurus with all of Chopra’s ideas but none of his money; Sheryl Hoover (Collete), the mother who tries to keep everything together; Frank Ginsberg (Carrel, in a career-best performance), a suicidal Proust scholar, Grandpa Edwin Hoover (Arkin), a heroine-snorting, sex-crazed war vet; Dwayne, (Paul Dano), an existentialist pilot wannabe, and Olive Hoover (Abigail Breslin), the most unlikely beauty pageant candidate. All endearing. And all out to conquer California so that little Olive could have a shot at the titular crown.
All actors turn in strong performances, but the revelation was Breslin herself, who didn’t need to play it cute just to get audiences sit up and notice, especially with her final, side-splitting performance in the pageant. (Four stars)
Note: Photo Courtesy of IMDB
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