All happy families are alike. All dysfunctional families, at least in the movies, are unhappy and unhilarious in different ways. If you're going to get on the wavelength of Little Miss Sunshine, you've got to be able to enjoy a comedy in which the characters fit into hermetically cute, predetermined sitcom slots. The members of the Hoover clan include the ineffectual boob of a father (Greg Kinnear), who's desperate to market his annoyingly unoriginal ''9 Steps'' motivational program; a saintly sourpuss mom (Toni Collette); her gay brother, a suicidal Proust scholar (Steve Carell); the teen son (Paul Dano), who hates his family so much that he hasn't spoken in a year; and Grandpa (Alan Arkin), a grouch who stokes his X-rated I got nothin' to lose! commentary by snorting heroin.
Sorry, folks, but these are not organic characters; they're walking, talking catalogs of screenwriter index-card data. One can't deny, though, that there's an idiosyncratic plastic cleverness to Little Miss Sunshine. As the family drives to Redondo Beach so that 7-year-old Olive (the charming Abigail Breslin) can compete in the Little Miss Sunshine preteen pageant, the movie shrouds its synthetic soul in a patina of ''indie'' realism: the leisurely rhythms, the lovely desert road-movie vistas, the terrific actors doing what they can to alchemize schlock into gold. The beauty-pageant climax is pure hypocrisy, as the movie mocks the freakish baby-whore contestants yet celebrates Olive for doing, in essence, just what they do. Smarmy? Yes, but more than that, not funny.


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