Putting dysfunction to the road test

TAKE Greg Kinnear as a relentlessly upbeat self-help guru wannabe, Steve Carell as a Proustian scholar gone suicidal over a hunky grad student, and mix them up with Alan Arkin as the heroin-snorting grandfather and Toni Collette as the barely-holding-it-together mom.

Stuff them into an ancient, malfunctioning VW minibus with a bespectacled 7-year-old who thinks she can win a beauty pageant and her mute-by-choice teenage brother and you have “Little Miss Sunshine.”

Cherry-picked by Fox Searchlight from this year’s Sundance Film Festival for a record $10.5 million, “Little Miss Sunshine” sends the dysfunctional family on a trip from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach in hopes of letting its youngest member participate in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant. Though the what-disaster-willbefall-them-next narrative may seem a tad familiar, it has enough dark, wince-inducing truth about family life to give it true indie cred and enough star power to give it box office legs.

Not that anyone’s visibly jockeying for top billing -- in this true ensemble effort, the performances lift the film out of the realm of the quirky family road picture into a true group portrait with every member allowed his or her moment to shine.

-- Mary McNamara