Now, all these years later, I submit to my angry classmate Little Miss Sunshine (2006). Written by Michael Arndt (who clearly must have run sound or worked the registration booth at a children's beauty pageant, so fierce and sharp is his portrayal of the personalities behind the scenes) and directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, Little Miss Sunshine follows a family of misfits on a doomed-from-the-start trip from New Mexico to a beauty pageant in California, one apparently designed by a pedophilic Fellini. Most of the film reviews I’ve read have focused on the road trip, that most American of movie tropes, but I'm more interested in the goal. (I should insert a warning—I couldn't care less about spoilers; as far as I'm concerned, if I know how the movie ends, I can concentrate more on the execution. So watch out.)

The family is a collection of dysfunctions verging on the stereotypical, redeemed finally by the inspired cast. As the would-be beauty queen Olive, Abigail Breslin gives a disconcertingly good performance, showing a willingness to humiliate herself that raises her to comic triumphs she might seem too young to pull off. Her character’s tender relationship with her heroin-addicted grandfather (Alan Arkin, in the role of a lifetime) is the emotional center of the film; in a much-quoted scene, Grandpa reassures the chubby, bespectacled Olive that she is beautiful: "I'm madly in love with you, and it's not because of your brains or your personality. It's because you're beautiful." A less-discussed but equally moving relationship develops between Nietzsche-obsessed, silent Dwayne (Paul Dano) and his gay, suicidal uncle Frank (Steve Carrell). When Frank, the former top Proust scholar in America, consoles Dwayne with Proust's depressing biography the film hits a surprising high point, with Carrell revealing the same emotional depth that miraculously raised The Forty-Year-Old Virgin (2005) from adolescent sex humor to grown-up wisdom. Greg Kinnear (somewhat unconvincing as a loser – who wouldn't trust Greg Kinnear?) plays the father, a failed motivational speaker who mistakes insensitive goading for encouragement. As his patient but frazzled wife, the brilliant Toni Collette is playing the kind of role she has excelled in since Muriel's Wedding (1994)– a failure whose deluded persistence carries a sort of trashy glory that nips pity in the bud.

Deluded and trashy as this family may be, they prove themselves a curious moral center in a film populated by characters more "normal" than they, but much, much more sick. Consider the scene in which the family is narrowly saved from arrest when the patrolman who pulls them over finds his favorite magazine in Grandpa's porn stash; earlier in the film, the porn provided an odd but touching moment of acceptance between homophobic Grandpa and Frank, but the cop's reaction is pure, unsettling lust. Or consider the cold and unsympathetic grief counselor whose rigid adherence to regulations causes the family to commit a strange and completely understandable crime; her refusal to respond to human pain is starkly contrasted with the family's willingness to go to any lengths for loyalty.

It is when they arrive at the pageant, however, that their true decency is revealed in the most paradoxical and ironic manner possible. Surrounded by heavily made-up children in revealing clothing with teased and highlighted hair, Olive stands out as a beacon of chastity in her one-piece bathing suit, her ice-cream belly straining at the cloth. When she performs an awkward strip-tease to Rick James' "Superfreak" (taught to her by her grandfather, of course), the film demonstrates a stunningly clear-eyed understanding of the child's beauty pageant – as she gyrates to the suggestive song, Olive strips away all the pretense of the pageant and reveals its sick, dirty heart. When her family joins her on stage, bringing the parade of kiddie porn to a crashing halt with their joyously vulgar moves, they liberate themselves and the audience from the stifling perversions of normalcy.