Acclaimed by critics as one of 2006’s must see pieces of cinema, festival darling Little Miss Sunshine concerns a dysfunctional family’s road trip to California for the titular child beauty contest. Very much one of those watery American indie flicks billed as comedy-dramas yet incapable of inciting more than weak laughter and surfeit empathy, lessons are learned, bonds are questioned, and madcap set pieces are jauntily executed; so far so blah. Easy to sniff over but difficult to hate, the film melts on the brain like candy floss on the tongue; light, sweet, and ultimately transient.

Thank God, then, for that cast. All-too familiar archetypes are saved from banality by nuanced, sincere performances; throw a stone, hit a Best Supporting aspirant. Not everyone is at top form- Carrell coasts as a droll Proust scholar with suicidal tendencies and Collette gets the short straw as the put upon mediator mum cutout. Greg Kinnear, however, is pitch perfect as the motivational speaker father whose only topic of conversation is his own imagined success, and a terrific Alan Arkin somehow makes his crude-tongued punchline of a character feel human.

Saucer-eyed Abigail Breslin is the breakout star of the film, and most watchable as the giddily optimistic pageant-princess wannabe keeping the sorry bunch of adults malcontents together, smile pinned to her cherubic face like icing smeared over a cupcake. Whilst criticising America’s latest Tweenheart is an act analogous to punting bullets into Bambi’s momma, it must be said that few have done less for an Oscar nod. Is a winning grin and knack for earnest brow-furrowing really all it takes these days? Does that mean Winona Ryder gets her career back?

Without the blanket of warm screen presences, the film would undoubtedly run cold. The direction is bland and blank, barely above TV movie standard, and Michael Arndt’s writing is similarly prescribed. More a product of screenplay seminar binging than any real sentiment, it’s too neat and ‘filmy’ for such an airy, would-be earnest picture.

The comedy is particularly uninspired. Politics and Paris Hilton aside, is anything easier to 'satirise' than child beauty pageants? Most misjudged is the jarring climax- a presumed attempt at life-affirming middle finger to conformity, it achieves only in raising some unsavoury questions about grandpa. Seriously, what on Earth was going on during those rehearsal sessions?



Recommended:
No