The heroin addicted, brusquely crude Grandpa was played brilliantly by Alan Arkin. Greg Kinnear was wonderful as the father playing a less than famous and far less than successful, unpublished success author and speaker.
The mother was played by Toni Collette and she is super talented and for some reason I found her irresistible. I had a feeling she had been in something else and thank goodness for IMDB I found out where, she was the mother in Sixth Sense and was similarly totally compelling in that role.
Abigail Breslin was great as the daughter and the Little Miss Sunshine contestant. She actually had one scene that sent me to the upper deck of my movie theater to be by myself so I could cry as hard as I wanted to. I won't ruin it for you, but it happened when her and Alan Arkin were chatting and if you see it you'll know exactly the scene I'm referring to.
Finally, in a bit of a show-stealer role a guy named Paul Dano played the brother. He is practically a mirror image (youthful that is) of John Cusack and thankfully lives up to Mr. Cusack's talent at that age. Strangely and quite delightfully he spends much of the movie not talking (partly because of flight school and partly because of Friedrich Nietzsche).
I'm not a big fan of revealing a lot of the storyline but overall it's quirky, funny, a little dark and a lot of silly at points. It was done by Fox's Searchlight Films which I know did Napoleon Dynamite and it was a little formulaic that the end included a dance scene.
But you know something? I'll take formulaic for things like Little Miss Sunshine and Napoleon Dynamite ANY day of the week over another tired murder, sci-fi, even love story and their mind numbing sequels whose formulas are so old they are forced to look to old lame tv shows to bring back to screen.
Bravo to Mr. Arndt and the actors of Little Miss Sunshine, you brought some serious light into my life.
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