LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE (B-)
Starring Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Steve Carell, Adam Arkin, Paul Dano, and Abigail Breslin. Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris.

The parts of Little Miss Sunshine I liked best were the quiet ones, where the characters gets to reveal personalities that are deeper than their broad comic types. Tortured Artist Frank (Steve Carell) has a great heart-to-heart with Rebellious Son Dwayne (Paul Dano) about how the most valuable experiences in life are the painful ones. Cantankerous Coot Grandpa (Alan Arkin) comforts his Success-Obsessed Loser son Richard (Greg Kinnear) after an important deal goes south. Innocent Child Olive (Abigail Breslin) fears that she isn’t beautiful.

Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris surround these grounded moments with big broad comedy, and the two don’t mesh well. As often as the film is observant about the family’s humanity, it resorts to quick yuks that exploit the family’s quirks. For instance, the film gets a lot of mileage out of Richard and the irony that defines him: he is a motivational speaker who has designed a program to make you become a success, but he hasn’t succeeded at anything. It’s a character type we’ve seen variations of before, and Little Miss Sunshine doesn’t have anything new to say about it.

Other scenes land just shy of the bull’s-eye, as when Frank encounters a male student whom he was in love with. Frank recently attempted suicide, and it was this student who began his downward spiral. But the student looks like an exaggeration of the kind of student Frank might fall in love with, blandly handsome with an obnoxiously popped collar. The coincidental meeting is staged so that the student can catch Frank buying pornographic magazines and get the wrong idea, to intended comic effect, but that bit of sitcom humor is nothing compared to the tender moment that follows, in which Frank watches the student drive away. We can see on Carell’s face the urge to both scream out and save face, and we wish the rest of the scene were more like that — plumbing pathos for comedy instead of the simpler sitcom scenario.

A later scene in a hospital expresses a little too nakedly its low regard for the health care system. Unsympathetic doctors and cold bureaucrats seem to wear signs that signal what message they’re meant to convey — this poor, travel-weary family can’t catch a break from the big bag impersonal hospital staff. This is followed by the theft of a corpse, which, like a lot of the film, is a little funny, but a lot of weird.

Speaking of weird, Little Miss Sunshine takes weird to spectacular heights when the family arrives at the titular pageant, at which Olive has been selected to compete. The film captures in excruciating detail the perverse pedophilic atmosphere of children’s beauty pageants, but why is that a subject for this film? It gets weirder from there, in ways that I won’t reveal so as not to spoil it, but if there are any thematic connections to be made, they’re buried under the film’s own outlandishness.

And yet I have great affection for these characters, and wished they were allowed a little more room to breathe, to feel a little more authentic, as they do from time to time but should do all the time. The film has all the pieces to make a great film but arranges them in such a way that the picture doesn’t come completely together.