On-Road Vehicle

Those episodic movies in which characters go on a journey together down the highways and byways of America often end up resembling a real-life road trip: Exciting at first, lulling for a while, and finally exhausting. The characters move from one place to another and encounter colorful people and colorful scenery on the way, slowly revealing the painful truth about themselves. The journey is a metaphor for their life’s journey.

Little Miss Sunshine puts us in a decrepit Volkswagen bus with six people and forces us to travel with them from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach in California. But, unlike other road movies, this one doesn’t peel them like onions, revealing the layers beneath. We know most of what we need to know about the six characters in short, sharp scenes that take up the movie’s first few minutes. Richard (Greg Kinnear) delivers a self-help lecture with great gusto . . . to six or seven depressed people at a community center. His teenage stepson Dwayne (Paul Dano) does hundreds of sit-ups under a large drawing of Friedrich Nietzsche. His seven-year-old daughter Olive (Abigail Breslin) stares open-mouthed at a video recording of the Miss America pageant. His 75-year-old father (Alan Arkin) wears a funky leather vest as he snorts heroin in the bathroom. His brother-in-law Frank (Steve Carell) sits in a hospital wheelchair, his wrists bandaged from a failed suicide attempt.

They are all obsessives, lost in their own dreams. Only Richard’s wife Sheryl (Toni Collette) is living in the world as it is and, given her constant expression of pain and worry, she would be better off finding a fantasy and taking up residence there like everybody else in her family.

Sounds dreary, I know, like one of those plays whose second acts are taken up entirely by people screaming at each other about their rotten childhoods. But it’s far, far from dreary–and it has none of the exhausting qualities of other road movies. The foul-mouthed, uncompromising Little Miss Sunshine is one of the funniest American movies in years, and one of the best–a bracing, heartfelt, and inventive comedy that concludes on a note of totally cockeyed and wonderfully well-earned triumph.

And the jokes are good, too. Take Frank, the suicidal brother-in-law–played beautifully and soulfully by Carell, heretofore known primarily as a wild and crazy comedian. Frank describes himself, ruefully and probably accurately, as the foremost Proust scholar in the nation. He has tried to take his life because he fell in love with a male student and lost his professorship over it. But the loss of love isn’t the cause of his collapse. He’s really gone belly up from professional jealousy. The male student, it turns out, has ended up with the nation’s second-ranking Proust scholar. And as the movie goes on, we discover by degrees that while Frank is riding in the back seat of the Volkswagen bus, his rival has won a MacArthur genius grant, scored a BMW convertible, and published a book about Proust that’s riding the New York Times bestseller list. It’s a brilliant, exact, and hilarious portrait of justified envy.

Little Miss Sunshine is the first produced work of a screenwriter named Michael Arndt, and it reeks of auto biography. Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris have made sure it looks and feels like an artifact from the 1970s–which was, presumably, the time of Michael Arndt’s boyhood, when he would have been around the same age as the teenage Nietzschean, Dwayne.

Only the BMW convertible we see offers evidence that the movie is even set in the present day. Olive’s fascination with beauty pageantry seems like a dream of an earlier era, before JonBenet Ramsey’s 1996 murder made the entire business disreputable. And Richard’s self-help blather about not being a loser is redolent of Me Decade scammers like Werner Erhard–all the more so because it’s clear Richard is himself a classic American loser.

What makes Little Miss Sunshine more than just a pitiless memoir of a dysfunctional family offered up by a contemptuous escapee is the surprising gumption its members display. Faced with unmistakable evidence that their dreams are going up in smoke, Richard and his crew brush off the ashes and get moving again. Their determination to get Olive to her pageant in Redondo Beach even leads them to an outrageously unexpected (and unexpectedly hilarious) hospital hijacking.

What they all understand is that little Olive, the only innocent among them, deserves to retain her innocence, no matter what. In the end, their absurdity is matched only by their nobility, and Michael Arndt’s ability to see and portray both sides is the true glory of Little Miss Sunshine.

John Podhoretz, a New York Post columnist, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.