Dir: Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris

Starring: Steve Carrell, Alan Arkin, Toni Collette, Greg Kinnear

Little Miss Sunshine is that rarest of things: a feel good film that never once resorts to a staple of the genre. That the film manages to leave the audience on such an exuberant high is a miracle; the whiff of optimism that Michael Arndt's script offers the viewer comes not exactly in the form of hope, but as an acceptance that things can only get better.

The story centres around the extended family of a podgy, graceless pre-teen who, by some clerical anomaly, has found herself in the finals of the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant. Reluctantly, her family cram into a faulty VW and traipse across America. Along for the ride are her parents (Collette and Kinnear), her suicidal, homosexual, Proust scholar of an uncle (Carrell), her homophobic, coke-snorting grandfather (the brilliant Alan Arkin), and her misanthropic and wilfully mute brother (Paul Dano).

It is often said that the key to comedy is containment and that drama is conflict. As if to prove these paradigms, the modest premise of Little Miss Sunshine delivers both of these in spates. Stuck in the van are the uncle who hates his brother-in-law and himself, the helpless self-help guru who hates 'losers', and the tortured teen who hates them all. There are times, indeed, when the viewer comes to doubt the positive resolution that seemed so inevitable in the posters.

Many of the film's perfectly pitched moments come in places where a lesser writer - or a writer of a lesser ambition - would resort to cheap sentimentality. The way in which Little Miss Sunshine manoeuvres itself around such potential pot-holes is genuinely a joy to behold. In the hospital, after the news of her father's death has been broken, Collette implores to her children that she loves them before bursting out in tears. The wordless Dano reaches for his pad and scribbles a three-word note for his little sister who has yet to compute the situation: 'Go Hug Mum,' its simply reads.

This refusal to surrender to the hackneyed ideals of Hugging and Learning extends to the film's spectacular climax. Resisting the obvious urge to moralise about the innocence-trampling sexualisation of children in such events, Arndt has our hero's performance at the pre-teen pageant as the most overtly sexual in a touching homage to her dead letch of a grandfather.

A surprising and brave end to a wonderfully original film.

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