I think, ultimately, the centre of each character's arc in Little Miss Sunshine isn't the painful emotional hammering that they're each exposed to, but the moment of freefall and then the landing, and then the getting up after the landing, and the moving on. It isn't always on camera or part of the immediate action - Frank's moment comes before the movie even begins - but they've all got them and they're all simultaneously quite horrifying and quite beautiful. The particular moment I liked the most was Dwayne's, which had some really solid camera work attached to it and it was all about that pivoting one hundred eighty degrees - we start out with one status quo for the character and then that all comes crashing down and he has to make himself a new status quo so that the movie can actually continue. They all fall, they land, they stand up, they turn around and keep going. Frank's freefall is related after the fact, his suicide attempt, and is delivered with a deadpan expression over the dinner table when little Olive asks what happened to his arms. He lists off the events leading up to the attempt and after each one Olive asks if that was what made him do it and he simply responds with "Well, no, but then..." And he just gets up and walks on, emotionally. We never actually see him attempt suicide again, because he's made a new status quo for himself even when old reminders crop up and bite him on the ass.
The cinematography is beautiful, flat, desolate, and grainy. It perfectly reflects the tropes of the genre that the movie falls into: the road movie. At times, the genre is its own pitfall, as the Hoover family on their way to the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant in California (where little Olive is supposed to perform) undergo the requisite road movie obstacles and cliches. There's a dead body in the trunk because there's always a dead body in the trunk in road movies. There's the apparently horrible car trouble that threatens to bench them until at least Thursday, when a car part can be ordered. They get pulled over by the cop and something compromising must happen for them to continue. This is what struck me the most false, the Standard Road Movie Plot Points, and it's possible that those were all intentional - it's hard to work with a genre without depending on its tropes - but the script fails to integrate them properly and they stand out like a hitchhiker's thumb.
Most of the characters are quite compelled, and brilliantly acted - Olive, the youngest character was portrayed competently and with the peculiar sincerity of a small child that doesn't always come through from adult actors. Toni Colette proved herself to be a great actress yet again in spite of the lack of depth that the script gave her character, Sheryl, the mother of the family. You almost don't notice that she fails to undergo any real emotional freefall and mostly serves as a sounding board character - she's the shrill wife who doesn't react to her husband's misfortune correctly, she's the peacemaker between warring family members, she's the driving force behind getting Olive to the competition, but we never really find out who she is outside of that and don't get into her head as much as we do the other characters. Virtually everything we know about Colette's character is in that first twenty minutes of the movie - she cares about her brother but is infinitely uncomfortable trying to take care of him after his suicide attempt, she works a presumably unfulfilling job and never has time to cook for the family but can't extricate herself from the role - instead of someone else making dinner, she gets takeout chicken and a box of popsicles. She wants them all to be truthful about what they're going through while at the same time denying that she still smokes compulsively. Her character is never foregrounded as much as her character's role is, but Colette does a wonderful job with what she has.
And then there's the beauty pageant itself, which shuffles the movie out of the Road Trip Genre and into Horror Flick. The ending ultimately takes the horror and changes it into something completely new and the family in a strange moment of solidarity after fighting for the entire movie redeems it and themselves for a moment before burning off into the night. They bring innocence with them.
I walked in being worried that the movie was going to turn out to be terrible; I had this sinking feeling that all the good bits were in the trailer and the rest of the movie was going to be this long, empty void. I was surprised and genuinely delighted by the product, which had its flaws but made the most of itself and its genre. Top notch performances by people like Alan Arkin as the Grandfather, and Toni Colette, and Greg Kinear carried on through the weak moments in the script and it took us into the really strong, brilliant, bright moments. The cinematography was striking - the best shot in the film was of Frank, Dwayne, and Sheryl shot through the back window of the VW minibus, pushing it along to get it rolling again, that weird feeling of being stationary in the bus but moving, a natural tracking shot with the hot sun and desert behind them. There are stark, understated transitions and the use of music was both relentless and appropriate. Despite it's weaknesses, I still really enjoyed Little Miss Sunshine a lot. Worth seeing.