Cinema: Sweet and lowdown

Familiar families on the road in Little Miss Sunshine and terrorism in downtown LA in Right at Your Door. By Declan Burke

Take one VW camper van. Fill it up with an extended family that has enough hang-ups, foibles and quirks to populate a David Lynch retrospective, lace proceedings with a dry, understated sense of humour, and you have Little Miss Sunshine (15A), a huge hit with the Sundance Festival crowds.

From the heroin-snorting Grandpa (Alan Arkin) down to kiddies' pageant contestant Olive (Abigail Breslin), this is a family who redefine 'dysfunctional': Nietzsche-reading brother Dwayne (Paul Dano) has taken a vow of silence, suicidal gay uncle Frank (Steve Carell) is nursing a broken heart, while success-driven father Richard (Greg Kinnear) is one of life's natural losers. When Olive discovers she's qualified for the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in California, and has 24 hours to get there and register for the competition, the whole family packs itself into a tiny camper van and hits the road.

It's a Grapes of Wrath for a modern audience: but while Henry Ford & Co travelled cross-country against a backdrop of economic deprivation and disintegrating social networks, this family moves through a landscape that is ostensibly thriving and prosperous, but is in fact every bit as bleak, intimidating and disorientating as that which the Joads encountered. Although the real issue, of course, is that the family hasn't yet learned to knit together and face the world as one.

In the wrong hands, that theme could well have been delivered with ham-fisted heaviness, but writer Michael Arndt and directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris have a delicate touch that nudges and tickles rather than pokes and prods. The performances too are a joy, with Alan Arkin in rambunctious form, although young Abigail Breslin steals just about every scene she's in. Best of all, however, is the stirring finale of the Little Miss Sunshine pageant: just when you expect the tale to descend into saccharine slush, the story grabs the concept of beauty contests for children by the throat, drags it outside into an alley and gives it the kicking it deserves.

Written and directed by debutant Chris Gorak, Right At Your Door (15A) also boasts an unexpected twist at the end, although this time it's nowhere near as uplifting. When a 'dirty bomb' goes off in downtown LA, citizens are warned to seal their houses and allow no one in or out. But when out-of-work musician Brad (Rory Cochrane) hears his wife Lexi (Mary McCormack) at their front door, he's torn between duty, love and the instinct for self-preservation.

The 'what-if' storyline is a riveting one, even if the entire movie is more or less played out in a single house, with most of the dialogue happening between two people on either side of a sealed window; more importantly, the performances from Cochrane and McCormack are superb and utterly convincing, and the combination leads to a heart-breaking finale. It's a downbeat tale, as you would expect from a film dealing with a duplicitous, paranoid government; but what should really be celebrated is the fact that such a movie can still be funded and made in America, despite its current political climate.

Little Miss Sunshine ****

Right At Your Door ****