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| The Miserable Hoover Family, locked together in a VW bus. |
In his 2006 review when this film was released, my favorite movie critic Roger Ebert, now deceased, called Little Miss Sunshine, "a gentle family satire and a classic American road movie." Really?
Here's the Hoover family: A depressed, gay college professor (Steve Carrell) who has just lost his job and slit his wrists but survived, his middle-aged married sister (Toni Colette) who hates her life, her failed motivational speaker husband (Greg Kennear) who can't pay the bills, his foul-mouthed father (Alan Arkin) who locks himself in the bathroom to snort heroin, their miserable teenage son (Paul Dano) who has taken a vow of silence and writes notes saying "I Hate Everyone," and their pre-teen daughter (Abigail Breslin) who wants only to be in a beauty pageant, despite her lack of talent and beauty.
Their usual nightly repast is a bucket of take-out fried chicken and a can of Fresca for each of them. Mom makes a salad that nobody eats that ends up in the garbage disposal. This is no family I want to be in, and not just because I never liked Fresca.
This pathetic group embarks on a road trip so the daughter can compete in a beauty pageant 700 miles away, but have only two days to get there. The car breaks down immediately so they all have to push it to get it started and then jump in while it's moving every time they stop. (This happens repeatedly and gets old fast.) The grumpy grandfather OD's on the trip and ends up wrapped in a sheet in the trunk. The teen has a total meltdown telling them all how much they suck, the married couple has a huge fight in a seedy motel room, and the daughter does a striptease as her talent for the pageant -- taught by her porn-loving grandfather before his death -- getting the whole family on the stage fighting with pageant officials. The local police are called.
It's billed as a comedy. Have fun.
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