It's a film clever enough to call Marcel Proust a 'total loser.'

Yup, that's a quote. Frank (Steve Carell) is counselling his nephew Dwayne (Paul Dano) about why he should not miss his 'prime suffering years.' And Frank -- who keeps reminding everyone in earshot about his being the nation's foremost Proust scholar -- is a man who knows his suffering, as evidenced by the bandages wrapped around his wrists following a recent suicide attempt after rejection from his gay lover. Dwayne, hasn't said a word in nine months, the Nietzsche influenced teen maintaining a stoic vow of silence.

And these two are the relatively stable ones. Yup, this is one crazy busride.

The Little Miss Sunshine family is more dysfunctional than The Simpsons and The Osbournes thrown together, but debutant screenwriter Michael Arndt's script is astonishing because despite the immense (and I mean immense!) weirdness the ensemble cast takes us through, it still manages to provoke a constant, automatic empathy. It's not as if we've ever seen or heard of a family like this, yet we are touched by the situations and the poignancy, and relate to the characters. Honestly, that's some achievement.

Husband-wife directorial duos are a rarity, and Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Farris have made the unlikely jump from edgy music videos to a truly fine ensemble dramedy with startling smoothness. The film's lines seem rehearsed, the shots are deliberate, the characters meticulously complete -- if occasionally overbaked. There is very little throwaway, with any improvisation likely to have been incorporated into the film long before the final take. So while the film works completely as a heartwarming art-house ride, it is laced with an almost-affected coat of smugness, of a film quite besotted with itself.

To be fair, however, Little Miss Sunshine is decidedly irresistible.  

Abigail Breslin wears a fatsuit to play Olive, a young girl with an Ellen Burstyn-like obsession for the spotlight. Her earnest desire is to win a California-based beauty pageant for girls aged 7-9, and thus the family of extremes is bundled together into a bright yellow Volkswagen van, everybody (forced to come) along for the ride.

Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a motivational speaker who doesn't know where his job ends, well on the way to being broke. Disenchanted wife Sheryl (Toni Collette) has her hands full with the two crazy kids, suicidal brother Frank, Richard's undying winner-loser spiel, and his foul-mouthed, narcotically-inclined dad Edvin (Alan Arkin). Oh, and the stick-shift of the wagon, which she promptly breaks.

What a freakin' cast. Kinnear plays the straight man annoyingly well, and shows off his layers only when he has to. Collette, as always, humanises the situation and brings about the empathy in the unreal. Arkin is first-rate, his raspy voice and wrinkled neck helping flesh out this fornicating fossil of a character. Breslin is, like the yellow of the bus, a ray of brightness in this initially abysmal emotional landscape, and, like her character Olive, warmly infectious. Dano, wearing a supercool Big Brother t-shirt, doesn't lay a foot wrong playing a deceptively mature character.

My pick of the bunch is Carrell, the comic actor proving his increasing subtlety with each role. Here his character is arguably the hardest to play, but he approaches the complex role with relish, and minus the obvious. From awkward silences to cloying sarcasm, from sudden goodwill to nihilism, Steve is superb and devastatingly poignant. While his instinctive, chest-first pause while running towards automatic doors is hilarious, it is also his grief that gives the film its heart.

And that is something it definitely has. The rest may well be debatable. Touching on topics as adverse as drugs, competition, self-help, beauty pageants, colour-blindness and suicide is a tough ask, and the script does it all yet failing to make a true, incisive statement at any point, and even sadly going from utterly real to completely unreal -- though I do love the end.

Thing is, we've seen extreme families getting along before, and we will again. Is there anything driving an actual flame behind this Sunshine? It doesn't seem like there is. But then, like Charlie Bucket said, candy doesn't have to have a point.

This is a plot-driven film, made with extreme economy. Much as I'd like to rave about fantastic moments -- and there are several -- I guess you really should discover those on your own. In case you haven't gleaned this nugget of information from the above lines yet, this is the proverbial must-watch, a fine film most will love and merrily quote from.

In one word, delicious.

Rediff Rating: