Little Miss Sunshine

I guess I had my share of dysfunctional family life. My dad rarely spoke. His hobby was knocking holes in walls to make an exact fit for the television set. Finding school chess club too middle-class, I took up collecting used cigarette packets, putting together the neighbourhood's finest filthy, disease-ridden collection of dog-eared, rescued-from-the-gutter packets you could imagine. And I practised yoga (the weirder varieties). My mother's hobby was having hysterical fits. She would keep a collection of old crockery in the kitchen that she could smash when things got bad. My first brother played electric guitar, badly, driving the rest of us insane. The youngest brother was just a ball of fluff - an excuse around which everything else was supposed to revolve. My dad introduced me to my first half pint - at a pub where I'd been drinking to excess for a couple of years. That was before he threatened to throw me out the house for burning joss sticks and playing Bob Dylan records. But that's all in the past. Two divorces later and we're a very close family. Really. If blood is thicker than water, then ours is already half-congealed in our veins. The boys were all successful in their careers and my parents achieved their dreams.

No-one talks about the more outrageous side of family life - we pretend it doesn't exist, as if families are somehow just 'naturally happy' together. Yet it is in the strains and stresses of family life, surrounded by a deep notion of tolerance and underlying love even when you can't stand each other, that the closenesses, the true values of family are born.

"Instead of making a movie about family values, we wanted to make a film about the value of family." Little Miss Sunshine Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris say they are frustrated by the "ridiculous notion of the nuclear family," which has become so prevalent in the US and the UK.

The family in Little Miss Sunshine (which is the pageant title of the youngest member, Olive) is pulling apart at the seams. Dad / Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a hopelessly optimistic motivational speaker, trying to market his "Nine Steps to Success" and also forcing it on his family at every opportunity. His Nietzsche-reading son, Dwayne, has taken a vow of silence until he gets into Air Force Academy. 'Pro-honesty' mother (Toni Collette) is constantly harried by her family's eccentricities and secrets, especially after her brother Frank comes to live with them, a Proust scholar straight out of hospital for attempting suicide after being jilted by his gay lover. Into the mix comes Grandad Alan Arkin, a foul-mouthed hedonist, kicked out of his retirement home for snorting heroin.

Olive, the speccy, unlikely-looking and eponymous would-be beauty-queen, throws the family into turmoil when suddenly awarded a default place in the competition as someone else drops out. In one of the most unusual road trips ever, the family travel to the pageant through tragedy and comedy for a finale that will change the way they see themselves and make us ask questions about our own values and ideals.

Little Miss Sunshine is a hilarious comedy with a refreshing honesty and capacity for self-examination rarely found in mainstream movies. As it began, I thought "not my kind of movie - kids? Road trip? Light comedy? No way!" But soon I laughed till I cried, in spite of myself, and I also felt quite moved. Little Miss Sunshine works very well as a comedy, a side-splitting celebration of human eccentricities, but there are also deeper issues that can be explored through the film. The pacing is excellent (I waited many a scene to see the end of the slogan on Dwayne's T-shirt that begins "Jesus was..."). How are the ideas of Nietzsche (Man and Superman) going to coalesce with those of Proust (a loser who spent 20 years writing a book hardly anyone wanted to read, but is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language?) So many puzzles, so many excellently honed laughs.

Director Valerie Faris helps me make sense of it: "I have to credit the writer for putting all those things together. His (Michael Arndt's) brother is a literary scholar; so much of that character (Frank) came from him. But the thing I love about all these characters is that they all have a dream, a universe they've built, and it makes them bigger than the clichéd characters. Frank has a life you can imagine reading Proust, he was very much in his head, it was an intellectual life, and his challenge is a family where there isn't much intellectual discussion going on. He's brought right down to earth, so it's that distance that he has to travel that is the major thing.

"Nietzsche's idea of transcending, for the teenager, who feels trapped in the mundane existence of suburban family life - it just shows that he's longing for something more. All these characters, they were passionate, full of longing. Just that they are reading Nietzsche or Proust tells you something."

The individual aspirations of the characters - and how they are so far apart - are one of the charismatic things about the film. Co-director Jonathan Dayton adds: "It's their passion, their aspiration. That's what we loved about them. Whether you have an innate interest in Nietzsche or Proust, what's most important is the fact that you're engaged; you're seeking greater answers and reaching to understand life in a new way: then to see their hopes dashed in so many ways, and to understand what endures after failure or disappointment... They have a world that is bigger than the immediate story."

Little Miss Sunshine also puts forward the idea, in a very positive sense, that home is the source you can turn to when all else has failed. In one of my favourite scenes, Toni Collette, having tried desperately to reason with Dwayne (who is in the depths of depression), says to young Olive, "Go and talk to your brother!" It's a moving moment, the young child going over to her brother, and we are on the edge of the seat wondering what she will say. She makes the connection her way, remembering the lesson her brother had given her when their mother had been distraught.

Uncle Frank and Grandpa (Alan Arkin) strain the family to its limits, but they are also key factors in the two children becoming whole and finding themselves. They are 'family.' "It's not necessarily the place you desire," says Valerie, "but it is the place that accepts you and will take you back. We wanted to show the strength of what those bonds really are. You look at this strange biological connection. They are such a diverse bunch and there's no other connection. Even with adopted kids, there's this bond that you have to experience things together. You can be at your worst with these people and they still love you. You don't necessarily have to agree on everything."

I asked if it helped that all the family were pretty intelligent people, quite articulate. "These are all smart people, but I think it's that notion of emotional intelligence. They are all passionate, and in that passion they recognise fellow travellers, even though Frank and Richard are as far from one another as you could ever be, but they are both passionate about their pursuits."

If we compare family, as a place, to anywhere else in the world, it has a sense of acceptance you don't find anywhere else, a place where you can be yourself freely enough to grow. Says Valerie: "Sometimes there's people you enjoy being able to argue with. In a family you can do that, you can wrestle with them, whereas with most people you meet you have to be pretty careful. It (family) is this place where you can work things out. Most of life you have to watch yourself wherever you go, and you don't grow very much in that place."

Valerie and Jonathan are on tour with the film - and also with their three young children, aged 13 and (the two twins) 10. The film is rated '15' in the UK, meaning they couldn't legally see it.

I asked: "If you have responsible children and you are able to discuss difficult issues with them, would you want them to be able to see this film?"

"It's really the parents' job to understand where their child is at, and their emotional growth, but I hope that parents can share this film with their children," says Jonathan. Valerie adds, "In America, it's 'R' rated and a child can go with a parent." Jonathan says he appreciates that because as he thinks it's the parents' decision.

Whether you see Little Miss Sunshine just with the adults in your family or group, or watch it on DVD with younger family, it is a valuable and hugely entertaining film that has some beautiful emotions under the shouting. Don't be put off by the trailer, which is not very well made and doesn't give an accurate idea of the film.

If you are lucky, you might even pick up some "everybody just pretend to be normal" badges at an opening (They refer to a scene where the family gets hauled over by a cop after their van's horn gets stuck - the cop is blissfully unaware that there is a dead body underneath the pornographic magazines in the back of the truck).

Little Miss Sunshine took five years to make and will be delighting audiences for much longer than that. It may help America reconsider the slightly worrying practice of beauty pageants for tiny tots, but it is an awesome social comment on the value of families while we are being laughing uncontrollably into our popcorn.