Little Miss Sunshine The thought that you're watching the best film you may see all year surfaces early in "Little Miss Sunshine" --- like, as soon as you meet the characters. And this is surprising, because anything you may have read about this movie anything I tell you here will make it sound like the kind of forced, unfunny comedy that gives "independent" films a bad name. The dad (Greg Kinnear) is a relentlessly upbeat motivational speaker who is unable to find a publisher. His wife (Toni Collette) is so harried she's misplaced her femininity and has become the family enabler. Their teenage son (Paul Dano) looks like a Columbine killer-in-waiting; he reads Nietzsche, hates everyone in his family and has taken a vow of silence. Their 7-year-old daughter (Abigail Breslin) obsessively watches televised beauty pageants and dreams of winning a kid contest, although she wears huge eyeglasses and is as round as a Weeble. The wife's brother (Steve Carell) has been recently displaced as America's #1 Proust scholar by his ex-boyfriend's new lover. He's botched a suicide attempt and has come to live in the only home that will have him. And just to round out this clan of freaks, there's Kinnear's father (Alan Arkin), a grizzled codger who swears like a sailor, snorts heroin and is the talent coordinator for his granddaughter. You can guess the plot. The kid gets invited to a California beauty pageant 700 miles away, and the family piles into an old VW minibus in a mad dash to get there. Along the way, Things Happen --- including the malfunctioning of the VW clutch. (Get it? In the clutch, they have no clutch.) Problems surface that can't be ignored. Distant satellites are forced to acknowledge their bonds. There's an epic climax at the pageant, but who cares --- the freaks have become a family. Dreadful. Dreadful. And yet I tell you that you will laugh yourself silly --- tears of laughter, the best of all tears, will roll down your cheeks. And you will cry for sadness just as much, because you will watch real failure, failure that cannot be denied or rationalized. And you will be slack-jawed too, because two very gifted directors (a husband-and-wife team) have taken a first-time writer's very smart script and brought the characters to life as complex people. These are not Hollywood caricatures. That's the point. The whole point. Really, you could think you're watching a brilliantly-dubbed French movie --- complex emotions are the rule here. And honest emotions at that. For example: When it is clear that Kinnear has blown his business opportunity, Arkin puts his hand on his son's shoulder and tells him how brave he was, how he tried to do something that few men ever do, something that he, for one, never did in his life. This scene is astonishing in its openness and tenderness, and it would blow you away but for the simple fact that the movie is mined with these moments. And so you lean in, getting more involved, more awake, as the miles and the movie roll on. Yeah, you're being entertained, and royally so. But more: you're going to school. These are smart characters, and they say smart things, and very soon you're having a kind of conversation with them, giving them advice, as it were, or asking yourself "What would I do?" And the shocker is: What they do is just fine.  They may or may not triumph, but they're working on it. They're alive. They're having their lives. There are lots of films that take ciphers, pump up the pressure and show how ordinary people do glorious things. As story “arcs" go, it's a chestnut: it's half the movies Tom Cruise has made, it's "Rocky." This is that movie too. Just better written, better acted, better directed than the others. And the little kid at the center of it --- wow. Take that, Julia Roberts! Learn from her, Reese Witherspoon. My advice: Read no more reviews. (You will thank me for telling you, in fact, very little about this movie.) Just go. Ideally with people who like or love. but alone if you have to. And then tell me if you saw what I think I did: the movie of the year. --- by Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com To buy the DVD of "Little Miss Sunshine" from Amazon.com, click here. Copyright 2006 by Head Butler Inc.