Sydney Film Festival 2006: Little Miss Sunshine

Little Miss Sunshine, directed by Jonathon Dayton and Valerie Faris 2006.

Now as a rule I purposely avoided picking films at the Sydney Film Festival that I thought I would be easy to see at home. Little Miss Sunshine was the one film that completely broke my will to follow that mandate and now I have the pleasure of sharing this review with everyone.

I'm an admitted Steve Carrell fan, so when I saw he had a new comedy I immediately wanted to see this film. For those of you who are not huge fans of Steve Carell, never worry. He is only one player amidst an excellent cast. In fact, if I were only allowed to tell you one thing about this film it would be that Alan Arkin absolutely steals the show. I'm not even sure that I realized he was in the movie going in, but I was incredibly impressed by this comedic performance of his as a grandfather with a Heroin addiction.

This film is about a family, a highly dysfunctonaly family. The head of the household is played by Greg Kinnear. Richard is a motivational speaker whose spiels focus on how to be a winner and not a loser, although one begins to wonder who he is trying to convince. Steve Carrell is the uncle who unsuccessfully tries to commit suicide. Kinnear's wife Sheryl is the only normal one of the family that is rounded out by Dwayne, your typical angst riddent teenager who so desperately wants to be an air force pilot that he's taken a vow of silence until he achieves that goal.

From this weird almagation of a family arises an incrediby funny family road film. The entire family up and heads out to California in a beat up VW van because the youngest of the family, Olive has won a beauty pageant by default and now has a chance to compete in the "Little Miss Sunshine" beauty pageant.

I really don't want to say much more than that about the film, because anything I might say would potentially ruin some of the surprises and humor of the film. Perhaps I would be best served by noting that even though I was horribly sick when I went to see this film, I still ended up hacking up a lung in the theater because I couldn't contain my laughter. Easily one of the best American films I've seen this year.

Oh and one last little note. There were some brief moments where I felt the film teetered on the edge of being overly sappy with a forced moral message. Thankfully it avoids these pitfalls. That isn't to say there isn't a message or depth to the film, it just means the writing was good enough it didn't need to resort to the cheap emotional string pulling many films degrade into.

***and a half Stars