little miss sunshine

So I finally got around to seeing this movie that everyone told me I would like, that it was enjoyable and cute, etc. The best review of it that I read compared it to Harold and Maude, which is way off in terms of quality, but pretty accurate in terms of tone: not quite a black comedy, sometimes not a comedy at all, embarrassingly life-affirming, episodic, has great acting. On the other hand, it was fairly predictable, from plot points (will the brother who is not speaking until he gets into the flight academy shockingly speak at some point?!-- will someone abusing heroin possibly die?) to the straw-men topics of motivational speakers, highway patrol cops, and beauty pageants. On the other hand, Steve Carrell is incredible, and the funniest part is this (I cite from another review): He makes the name "Nietzsche" (which he pronounces crisply as "Neet-chah") inexplicably hilarious. There's no way to imagine that, of course, but his whole performance is otherworldly-- and maybe that's the best thing I can say about the film. The desperately peppy and misguided dad, the stressed-out mom, the crude grand father, the stoic brother, the quirky and oblivious sister: they all seem like they came from the same writer's imagination. They fit in suspiciously well as dramatic foils to each other, although this produces surprisingly little comedy. But then Steve Carrell operates as a kind of "reality effect" in this movie (to wildly abuse that term), because structurally, tonally, in every way, he does not fit in to the more conventionally demented proceedings of the family-film that otherwise kind of stutters along.