As I was watching Little Miss Sunshine I kept going back and forth between thinking it was a very good movie and thinking it was a mediocre one. I would see a scene that was both funny and insightful and be enchanted. But then there would come a clunky scene and I would reevaluate how I felt.

However, the last part of the film, which concerns the actual Little Miss Sunshine pageant, turned out to be the strongest section of the movie, and it left a very nice bittersweet aftertaste. Also, it includes the funniest scene I saw last year not in Borat. That convinced me that the movie was indeed very good and deserving of the praise it was getting.

But the last section didn’t erase the clunky scenes. They are still there, and they keep LMS from being the great movie it could be. And that is really frustrating, because the film gets so much right. The characters, the family dynamics, the pain and laughter that go hand and hand with each other in so many situations. But now and again the movie forgoes all that and makes the characters act stupidly to get a cheap laugh. Or it has some improbable thing happen, like a peripheral character appearing out of nowhere just to artificially heighten the tension.

Like I said, very good movie. But it could easily have been a lot better.