With so much baggage, it's amazing the Hoovers can fit in the same car, and that Little Miss Sunshine isn't a smug, smirking catastrophe. The movie is full of opportunities for the audience to feel superior to these deluded dreamers, as when Richard, who's just trashed the van's transmission midway to the coast, hijacks a scooter for a midnight expedition to a "dynamic strategies expo," where he hopes to spin the nine steps into a lucrative franchise. But however absurd (and sometimes pathetic) the Hoovers' pipe dreams, they're all they've got to cling to. Richard hasn't just wasted his time on the nine steps; he's mortgaged his family's financial future. The look on Sheryl's face when his deal falls through is all it takes to sketch the very real oblivion the family is up against.

OFF THE ROAD: Little Miss Sunshine's lost souls.

American movies have preached the can-do gospel since the beginning, but they have rarely confronted the specter of failure — not shake-it-off, live-to-fight-another-day setbacks, but unmitigated, unsalvageable defeat. Failure is unthinkable for Richard, who reminds his family that the world is composed of winners and losers, and tells his students that they must "refuse to lose." Success is a matter of character, not opportunity. Luck, he says, "is just the name losers give to their failings."

Richard is the movie's fall guy, spouting biz-book philosophy while racing obliviously toward his own demise. But his buzzword-heavy nostrums are just a boiled-down version of what his fellow travelers tacitly believe. Even Frank, who regards the Hoovers with a permanent look of bemused disdain, refers to himself as "the country's number one Proust scholar," as if academics were ranked like football teams. (His downward spiral was precipitated by the loss of his boyfriend and a genius grant to the erstwhile number two.) Not for nothing does Dwayne keep an enormous Nietzsche portrait on his wall.

Sunny, implacable Olive, who has yet to grasp the possibilities of loss, is untouched by her family's desperation, but she's still obsessed with victory, even if she doesn't quite know what it means. Standing in her parents' den, she obsessively rewatches her videotape of the Miss America pageant, mimicking the winner's feigned surprise.

Fortunately, neither Olive nor her family seem to have the slightest idea what it takes to win a child beauty pageant. When the Hoovers finally arrive at their destination, they're greeted with a terrifying excess of gaudy spectacle, and a parade of robotic contestants pressed from the same plastic mold. (Listen carefully and you'll hear Charisma Whiteman called to the stage.) By then, of course, we don't want them to win. We don't want anyone to win.

Although Dayton and Faris' background is in music video (their CV includes a Méliès-inspired Smashing Pumpkins video), they've given Little Miss Sunshine a purposefully unambitious look, all master shots and muted colors. There's not a bum performance in the bunch, but the pivotal turn is Carell's, since the movie takes its leisurely pace from his shellshocked glaze. It's hard to imagine that only a few years ago, Carell was just one of the Daily Show's funnier correspondents. In a brief series of performances, he's firmly established himself as an actor who can set the tone of an entire movie with just a few minutes of screen time. There's a word for that kind of actor, and it isn't loser.

Not long ago, Carell was playing second fiddle to Will Ferrell. But since Anchorman, Ferrell has starred in a series of stinkers, surrounding his prefab persona with thin storylines and haphazard gags. Talladega Nights, in which Ferrell plays a victory-obsessed race car driver named Ricky Bobby, is nigh on the worst of a bad lot, an appallingly lazy half-movie. Co-written by Ferrell and director Adam McKay, Talladega Nights has not much in the way of plot (Ricky gets to the top, is knocked down, and rises humbled), and what little there is comes in jagged, disjointed spurts, as if the guy behind you was impatiently riding the chapter skip button.

It's a shame, because the movie has a few dynamite sequences and a pitch-perfect supporting turn by John C. Reilly Ricky's long-suffering teammate, whose strategic blocks have been instrumental in Ricky's success. When Ricky rebuffs his request that, maybe just once, he be the one to win, Reilly responds with the dedication of a loyal friend too dumb to realize how much he's been hurt. "I'll just bury it deep down inside," he deadpans. "It hurts. But I love you."

Talladega Nights covers much the same ground as Little Miss Sunshine, although instead of Tony Robbins, Ricky's patron saint is his absentee father (Gary Cole), who left his son only the motto, "If y'ain't first, you're last!" Ricky's status-obsessed life is a testament to the shallowness of those words to live by; it's hard to ignore the fact that his twangy me-firster bears a striking resemblance to Ferrell's George W. Bush (although, given their provenance, you could just as easily accuse Bush of stealing Ferrell's shtick).

The movie's message, so to speak, is hopelessly undercut by the fact that the actors are posed in a blizzard of product placements, turning nearly every scene into a de facto commercial. At times, the logo-cluttered mise-en-scene is played for satire, but it's hard to swallow the climactic anti-sponsorship speech when it's delivered in front of a giant Craftsman display.

Anchorman, which McKay also directed, was a similarly haphazard experience, but at least it didn't have Talladega Nights' lackluster racing scenes, which pale infinitely next to the fluidity of Cars. McKay sends the camera shooting down toward Ricky's car, digitally penetrating its skin to get a mundane shot of Ferrell behind the wheel, a pointless flourish that only underlines the movie's lack of direction. There's no question that Ferrell is a star in a way Carell is not, but the freedom to develop his own projects doesn't seem to have done him any favors. Winning isn't all it's cracked up to be.

(sam@citypaper.net)