Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

There's a moment in Little Miss Sunshine where the whole family has to push-start a broken VW camper, then sprint alongside it before leaping through the side door one by one. It's chaotic, absurd, and somehow completely moving. That's the film in a single image: people held together by sheer effort and stubbornness, refusing to be left behind, laughing even when everything's going wrong.

Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, this is a road trip comedy that earns every laugh and every tear without once cheating for either. The Hoover family are a gloriously dysfunctional lot. Dad Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a delusional motivational speaker peddling a nine-step programme nobody's buying. Mum Sheryl (Toni Collette) is holding the whole enterprise together through sheer exhaustion and love. Uncle Frank (Steve Carell) is a Proust scholar fresh from a suicide attempt, now bunking on the sofa. Dwayne (Paul Dano) has taken a vow of silence and reads Nietzsche in his room. Grandpa (Alan Arkin) is foul-mouthed, sharp-witted, and not exactly drug-free. And then there's Olive, played by Abigail Breslin, nine years old, wide-eyed, and dead set on competing in the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant in Redondo Beach.

So they all pile into a battered yellow VW bus and drive.

What follows is less about whether Olive wins and more about what it costs this family, and what it gives them, to show up for her. The script is sharply funny without ever being cruel. These characters are satirised, yes, but they're never mocked from a distance. You feel genuine affection for all of them, even Richard with his hollow self-help mantras, because the film understands that delusion is often just hope wearing a costume.

The performances are extraordinary across the board. Breslin is astonishing: Olive is sweet without being sickly, hopeful without being naive, and utterly, completely real. Arkin's Grandpa steals scene after scene with that perfect balance of filth and tenderness. His scenes with Olive are the film's emotional anchor, and I won't pretend the weight of what happens to him didn't hit me hard. And Dano, communicating almost entirely without words, is quietly devastating. There's a breakdown scene, when Dwayne finally discovers something that shatters his world, where he barely makes a sound, and it's one of the most affecting moments in the whole film.

Collette, as ever, does so much with so little. Sheryl could easily have been the thankless "holding it together" mum, but she's given real texture and real weariness, and Collette brings every bit of it. Carell, meanwhile, plays almost entirely against type here, and it works beautifully. Frank's depression isn't played for laughs; it's simply part of who he is, treated with the same matter-of-fact honesty as everything else in the film.

DeVotchKa's score deserves its own mention. That accordion-driven, Eastern European-tinged music is so perfectly matched to the film's offbeat warmth that it's hard to imagine one without the other. It gives the whole thing a slightly otherworldly quality, like you're watching a fable, except one set in Arizona with a malfunctioning clutch.

The final sequence at the pageant is a masterwork of tonal balance. It's funny, it's uncomfortable, it's joyful, and it earns its standing-ovation moment without a single false note. It says everything the film wants to say about failure and acceptance and the courage it takes to be seen, without spelling any of it out.

I think about films like Mustang when I consider how well cinema can capture family as it actually is, messy and complicated and held together by love that people can't always articulate. Little Miss Sunshine sits comfortably in that company. It doesn't preach. It just shows you a family, broken in all their different ways, driving across the country together. The horn's broken. The clutch is gone. They keep going anyway.

Four and a half stars. One of the great comedies of its era, and honestly, one of the great films full stop.

Rating: ★★★★½  | Year: 2006  | Watched: 2026-02-17

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