Little Miss Sunshine is the debut feature of directing team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris who’ve previously specialised in music videos. So does this mean that this comedy is some kind of XXX/Fast & Furious MTV edited affair? No it does not.
The film has a superb cast featuring Steve Carrell, Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette and Alan Arkin amongst others as part of one of the most dysfuntional families you could meet including a drug-taking grandfather, a put-upon mother, a failed suicide, a mute teenager and an as-yet unsuccessful motivational speaker. For perfectly good reasons they all embark on a roadtrip to take their daughter to compete in the Little Miss Sunshine contest on the west coast. Travelling in a VW camper van, problems ensue, but delightfully, these aren’t always the obvious problems.
The film is a comedy, but throughout, there are truly tender moments, and jokes are not always the obvious ones. I laughed out loud plenty of times, and was in tears during a scene involving a car horn. The point is that although maybe not everything that befalls this family would happen all at once, this isn’t a film that relies on unlikely and improbable events to find jokes.
This is quite easily the funniest film I’ve seen this year. Thoroughly recommended.