'Sunshine' kin puts fun in dysfunctional

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published August 4, 2006 at midnight

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Little Miss Sunshine is a rarity, a feel-good comedy about people who have every reason to feel bad. To describe the Hoovers - the family at the center of this Sundance favorite - one must be thoroughly versed in the vocabulary of despair.

Dad (Greg Kinnear) believes he has invented a foolproof formula for success, the nine-step, Refuse to Lose program. Mom (Toni Collette) tries to soldier on, but that's no easy task when she must pick up her near-catatonic gay brother (Steve Carell) at a hospital after his suicide attempt.

And grandpa (Alan Arkin)? Well, he's a gleefully debauched fellow who has decided to enliven his golden years by developing a heroin habit and perusing porn magazines.

Don't look to the kids for solace, either.

As a result of reading Nietzche - not to mention the usual hormonal chaos - teenage Dwayne (Paul Dano) has taken a vow of silence. He will not speak again until he's admitted to the Air Force Academy, an ambition for which he couldn't be more ill-suited if he were trying to gain entry into the Miss America pageant.

That leaves Olive, who does want to be Miss America - or at least the junior version of it. She has entered the Little Miss Sunshine contest, and although she is chunky and lacking in obvious kiddie charms, she believes she can stand in the golden spotlight of victory.

Such is the table set by directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris as they roll their comedy onto the road - and a very bumpy road it is. The VW bus that's carting the family from Albuquerque to the Little Miss Sunshine finals in California blows its clutch and must be pushed to start.

So you see, dad is wrong: The Hoovers don't need self-help - they need divine intervention.

As directed by Dayton and Faris, the movie amazingly manages to dodge the bullet of formula, probably because the directors are keenly attuned to the dispiriting lives of their characters and because deep down they have an undeniable fondness for this hapless brood.

Dayton and Faris also have something to say. Before their movie concludes, it has taken joyously satirical swipes at a number of all-American values, most notably the idea that winning is everything.

Like all superior comedies, this one revolves around wonderful performances.

Kinnear has seldom done better work than as a man who's trying to maintain his belief in optimism in the face of all possible evidence to the contrary. Richard Hoover's can-do attitude proves totally at odds with a can't-happen world.

Carell uses his subdued comic style to great advantage as an academic who has been recognized as the top Proust scholar in the U.S., but who recently lost his student boyfriend to the second-ranked Proust scholar.

Dano epitomizes every surly, recalcitrant teen-ager with a bad T-shirt collection, and Breslin worms her way into your heart, particularly during the movie's outrageous finale.

As a longtime Arkin fan, I found myself wishing he'd work more. As Grandpa Hoover, he exudes defiance, spewing profanity and upholding values so raunchy they got him kicked out of his retirement home.

Yes, here's the all-American family, bickering, pushing each other's buttons and subsisting on a diet that goes heavy on takeout fried chicken. But don't condescend: Let he who is without delusion cast the first snide remark. There's probably a little Hoover in all of us.

I haven't seen a comedy this year that I enjoyed more, but then I dig dysfunction, not to mention the way Little Miss Sunshine strikes an impressive balance between buoyancy and despair or, maybe, it's buoyancy in the face of despair.

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