Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

At a glance, Little Miss Sunshine seems very ordinary. It's a road film. It's about a family with communication barriers, each member of the family immersed in their specific problems and issues. And by the end of this road trip, they will ultimately find what their family means to them, through a series of bizarre and comical events.
All that sounds like a load of cliche, but this film is far from that. Little Miss Sunshine builds on those very familiar themes, and manages to bring some new flavour to them. The result is a film that is at once funny and sad, sarcastic yet emotional, and undoubtedly a enriching film experience.
At the heart of this family, we have Olive (aka Little Miss Sunshine), a darling young girl played by Abigail Breslin. Don't be fooled by Ms. Breslin's youthfulness - she easily steals the show from her adult contemporaries. Olive isn't the typical slim little beauty pageant (in fact, she has a bit of a pouting belly), but that doesn't stop her from madly enthusiastic about the Little Miss Sunshine competition. She has a teenage brother, Dwayne (Paul Dano), who reads Nietzsche and wants to be an air force pilot, and who by the way has taken a vow of silence until he achieves that goal.
The father of those two kids, Richard (Greg Kinnear) is sort of a success guru, with his own original 9 steps of success. Unfortunately, his own career can't exactly be called a success. Still, he's happily married to Sheryl (Toni Collette), who's brother Frank (Steve Carrell) is a renowned Proust scholar and also a gay who had just attempted suicide (unsuccessfully). Olive's grandpa, the last member of the family, is deftly played by Alan Arkin, and still has a taste for drugs and porn.
When you mix this bizarre assortment of personalities together, the result is a recipe for chaos and disaster. To make it short, the family goes on a road trip to sunny California, so that Olive could attend the Miss Sunshine competition. The timing is quite bad though, because the family is in the middle of a financial and emotional crisis (due to myriad reasons). They eventually decide to go, though, for the sake of Olive, and the trip becomes a emotional roller-coaster, full of the flavours of life.
As I mentioned earlier, this film takes many familiar recipes and cooks out some refreshingly new flavours with them. For one thing, the characters are not just your average weird family - they are both eccentric and flawed, and despite their eccentricity we can connect with them. And secondly, the plot is certainly not afraid of spoiling the family picture mood (since it's not a family picture), and there are several quite unexpected developments along the way. Thirdly, the film contains some great humour, whether it's the deeply sarcastic look at children's beauty contests, or the hilarious events along the road (an encounter with a dirty - in the porn sense - police officer, for instance).
In the end, not much needs to be said about this film - it's a film that needs to be experienced, to feel the variety of flavours it offers. Just be prepared to be really emotionally stirred.
8/10