Little Miss Sunshine movie

My daughter and I had a date last night and we went to see Little Miss Sunshine. As a writer if you haven't seen it, you really should. What a brilliant movie. I'm not going to give you a synopsis of the movie, you can read that somewhere else besides this blog. What I want to talk about is how the writer and the actors managed to pull off an extremely funny movie that was deep. I found myself crying (there is a scene with the little girl Olive and her grandfather that moved me to tears), and laughing hysterically. The ending made me cry I was laughing so hard. All day today, I thought about this combination of emotions and what a tremendous job the screenwriter did to evoke this with his/her writing. More often than not a story is either funny or serious. And the funny stories are usually fluffy and light and you leave the theatre smiling or you finish the book and say, "that was a fun read." And the serious stories heavy, so you leave the theatre with a sad heart or you slowly close the book and think, "Wow that was thought provoking." After seeing Little Miss Sunshine, I left the theatre smiling but thinking about each and every character and the problems they had and how they were solved throughout the movie. And the way they were solved was not at all what the viewer expected. This movie had the theme about being successful and each character had to find out their own path to success. It also had a theme about not giving up, trying no matter what and not giving in even if life throws you a curve.
I think the other impressive thing about this movie was how real it was. At the beginning the Mom comes home and the house looks like a real family house and she looks like a real mom and wife. The actor they cast (she was also in In Her Shoes playing the sister to Cameron Diaz) is not a Hollywood beauty and I liked this because she portrayed a normal woman who I might meet at the supermarket.
I guess I'm writing this post because I was so impressed with the writing and how the author of the screenplay managed to create something so funny but so thought provoking.