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Trailer for "Little Miss Sunshine"

The finale of Little Miss Sunshine made me laugh so hard that it brought tears to my eyes, which was not the case with the rest of the film. I thought at the time that if ever a movie was redeemed by its ending, this was it. In retrospect I don’t think that’s the case: This is a too-often sloppy movie that slacks off just because it knows it has a killer ending in store. It also counts on a terrific cast to take up far too much of that slack.

Set on the road between Albuquerque and Redondo Beach (locations undoubtedly chosen on the assumption that audiences find the names inherently laughable), Little Miss Sunshine puts the troubled Hoover family in close quarters for a few days and dares us to believe that they might not survive the ordeal. These include father Richard (Greg Kinnear), trying to make a living as a motivational speaker and author despite no apparent qualifications for either job; wife Sheryl (Toni Collette), whose first marriage ended in divorce; son Dwayne (Paul Dano), who scowls at the world from under a giant poster of Nietzsche and has vowed not to speak until—well, until the end of the movie, anyway; Sheryl’s brother Frank (Steve Carrell), a suicidal Proust scholar; and Richard’s profane, substance-abusing father (Alan Arkin, who manages to put a fresh spin on an extremely clichéd character).

A hit at the Sundance Film Festival, Little Miss Sunshine uncomfortably treads a line between realism and farce. We can’t really laugh at these characters because their problems and pains are all too real. When daughter Olive (Abigail Breslin) gets a last-minute slot in a regional talent show 900 miles away, it comes at the worst possible time for her financially strapped parents. That they take her the only way they can, in a barely-mobile VW bus, wins them enough grace in our eyes for us to put up with their less fine qualities. But the movie has too many rough edges to ignore, just as it resorts too often to inventing improbably despicable characters as a shorthand way of building sympathy for the Hoovers. For a movie that wants to preach the message that winning isn’t everything, it lacks the nerve to let us see any of its characters as losers.