Little Miss Sunshine
Little Abigail Breslin is absolutely remarkable as cute little wannabe child beauty pageant star Olive, and between this and her fantastic work as the adorable Bo in Signs I’m ready to crown her the best child actor going around at the moment…which hopefully doesn’t mean she’ll become a crack-addicted party-whore mess in her teen years. Everything you may have read about her being the anti-Dakota Fanning is spot on, and unlike Dakota she actually acts exactly like a kid should and is a goofy, jovial, vulnerable energetic joy to watch and more than holds her own in an amazing cast that includes the ever-reliable Toni Collette, a vastly improved Greg Kinnear (improved from his horrible turn in Bad News Bears that is), and best of all 40 Year-Old Virgin Steve Carrell, who surprises with some serious dramatic weight as a suicidal gay scholar – although he is still given a few moments to shine comedically, as all the characters are.
In fact a few of the characters feel like they might have wandered in from the wonderfully off-kilter universe Wes Anderson cultivates in his brilliant films such as Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. Along for the road trip to get little Olive to the Little Miss Sunshine pageant is her motivational-speaking failure father, her disaffected teen brother who has taken a vow of silence, her heroin-snorting profanity-loving grandpa, and her mother who is just trying to keep them all together. Somehow the film manages to breathe some new life into the family road-trip genre and while there are a few predictable instances of wacky misadventure and the natural ‘happy family’ ending they still manage to manoeuvre smoothly around most of the clichés that you may expect, and subvert others accordingly. With characters as rich and as perfectly performed as this you could really stick them in any tired old situation and get something great back.
I wouldn’t say this was a truly brilliant film, nor is it anywhere near as screamingly hysterical as some reviewers have gushed, but Little Miss Sunshine is an absolute delight, warm and affecting without being overtly sappy and sentimental, and it’s always the sign of a good film that when the credits roll and you are left wanting to spend some more time with the lovable characters you have come to know over the last 100 or so minutes.