The newest road film, Little Miss Sunshine, opened last night in LA and NY--and it's great. This film comes with plenty of pre-release buzz, as it earned the highest bid of any Sundance Festival film ever; Fox Searchlight was smart to snatch it up. 
Like any great road film, Little Miss Sunshine smartly and credibly gets the characters on the road, takes them through conflict and triumph, builds tension alongside truly comic relief, and ends when the characters transcend their limitations and embrace self-acceptance. And like any great genre film, this one delivers on the conventions by making them entirely engaging, fresh, and funny. In the 800 miles between Albuquerque and Redondo Beach, magic occurs in the pressure-cooker conditions of the family car.
Olive (Abigail Breslin), the seven-year-old competing in the Little Miss Sunshine competition, is fabulous without being cute--indeed, the film intelligently criticizes the Shirley Temple/Lolita portrayals of young girls. Her brother Dwayne (Paul Dano) remains silent until he explodes with rage at the loss of a longtime dream, reminding me of how much hatred I also harbored toward my family when I was 15. The parents' fights over money also hit close to home. Alan Arkin is a top-notch actor in anything he does, and this is his second road film (his role in Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins from 1975 is definitely worth watching. Since I'm a professor, I loved the jokes about the #1 Proust scholar, the suicidal Uncle Frank (Steve Carrell), whose demise came not when he lost the love of his life to the #2 Proust scholar but when that academic won the more valuable "Genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation.
This near-perfect road film demonstrates the acceleration of road stories that recount family travels--especially the hilarious indie film from last year, The Talent Given Us (dir. Andrew Wagner), 
as well as the tales of Robert Sullivan's family travels in his new memoir, Cross Country, about which I'll be writing soon.
