It's on the road that the Hoovers first lose and then find themselves, both as individuals and as a family. There is engine trouble, naturally, which leads to a delightful sight gag that involves Richard tucked behind the wheel as the rest of the family pushes — then scrambles inside — the bus. An emblem of an earlier, possibly more freewheeling era, this temporary mobile home seems an unlikely vehicle for transformation, but it takes the Hoovers across state lines and through a series of emotional and psychological roadblocks. In between the fast-food joints, hot tears and hurled insults, there are wide-open spaces and a suggestion of freedom along with a sign for the "Carefree Highway," an actual state route that here seems more like a cruel joke.
For the most part, the jokes and the sensibility are more kind than not in Little Miss Sunshine, which motors forward on the strength of its seamless ensemble and direction, and its touching human comedy. Arndt unleashes scads of deftly funny one-liners and situations, the best of which float along on sheer absurdity, like the collision between some pornographic rags and Marcel Proust. The jokes don't land as lightly when they come with a message tied to the punch line, especially as the Hoovers near the Little Miss Sunshine competition, a ghastly spectacle that features kids writhing to pounding beats while weighed down by sequins and parental vainglory. Graham Greene's description of Shirley Temple's appeal as "interestingly decadent" could not be more apt.
However true to life, the Little Miss Sunshine competition comes accompanied by a whiff of class snobbishness. Richard weighs in as a total middle manager, the type of man who has read one too many self-help books. But, as the nods to Proust and Nietzsche suggest — and that VW bus, with its intimation of 1960s rebellion, underscores — the Hoovers are clearly not meant to be cut from the same tacky cloth as the rest of the pageant parents, who smother their daughters in spray-on bronzer and expectation. In a different film, one not as generous of spirit (or funny), that snobbishness might seem insufferable. Yet there's a melancholy here that clings to this family, which however triumphant and united, may well remain stuck in the national Hooversville located at the crossroads of hope and despair.
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