The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015. Remaining movies: 38 Days to go: 28
Movie #402: Little Miss Sunshine
Little Miss Sunshine is a portrait of a family. Not an Every-family, though. A very specific family. Uncle Frank (Steve Carell) has just attempted suicide and is being sent home to Albuquerque to live with his sister Sheryl (Toni Collette), who is a working mom doing her damndest to be supportive of her children and her husband and to keep everything running as smoothly as possible, be it dinner or activity scheduling or what have you. Sheryl’s husband Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a motivational speaker who is neither renowned or successful but who is dead set on practicing what he preaches and therefore insists on everyone presenting themselves as winners at all times. They have two children, Dwayne (Paul Dano) — who hates everyone and has taken a vow of silence until he can join the Air Force to fly jets in what is no doubt several years, as he is only 15 — and Olive (Abigail Breslin), who is a sweet and unassuming seven-year-old who has won her way into the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in Redondo Beach, California. Last but not least is Richard’s dad Grandpa Edwin (Alan Arkin) — inappropriate in every conceivable way while also being pretty amazingly loving and generous to Olive (and to his son as well, when necessary) — who, because he got kicked out of his retirement home for shooting heroin and God knows what else, also lives with them. In short, these are not universal characters defined by tropes, stereotypes and clichés. These are very particular people with a very particular story. And that story is failure.
Richard having the career aspirations that he does, he does not accept failure. He gives endless lip service to the differences between winners and losers and what it takes to differentiate yourself as one of the former. Never, ever, ever let yourself be the latter. And yet as the family travels from New Mexico to California for Olive’s competition (which she has sworn, at her father’s insistence, that she can win), they are inundated with indignities, humiliations, let downs, setbacks, and utter, inescapable failures, one after another.
As these failures mount, and everyone’s spirit but Olive’s is broken, it becomes crucial that they get her to her pageant on time. It’s imperative that something good come of their trip. However, when they arrive they are faced with the shocking and unsettling reality that Olive doesn’t fit in with the other contestants. Olive is seven, and she looks it. She has long, unstyled hair. She wears no make-up. And her only curves are those associated with childhood, like the roundness of her perfectly proportioned belly or the lack of any “womanly” hips. Comparing Olive to the garishly dolled-up appearance of her competitors, Olive’s family fears she’s about to suffer her own disappointing failure, and they seek to stop it. Sheryl, however, knows how much this has meant to Olive (and to Grandpa, who choreographed Olive’s dance), so she gives her a choice. Does Olive want to compete, or does she want to go home? Either is okay. Both paths still lead to her parents being proud of her. Olive, God bless her, chooses to compete, and she proceeds to perform the most inappropriately sexualized dance — to a highly sexualized song — this pageant or any other has ever seen. And it’s fantastic.
Olive’s performance is honestly one of the funniest moments in film just on its merits, but it’s also incredibly thoughtful and heartwarming. Here is a girl not at all sexualized in the way literally every single other seven-year-old in the competition is, and yet it’s her overtly sexual dance to “Superfreak” — which, to be clear, Olive doesn’t get the meaning of AT ALL — that offends the parents, contestants and organizers of the event, with a few awesome exceptions. Meanwhile, her family knows how off-putting this is, and they see clearly how uncomfortable everyone else is, but as long as Olive doesn’t see it, doesn’t feel singled out by it and isn’t made to feel uncomfortable about it, her family is okay with it. So they clap. And they dance. And they prevent anyone from taking Olive off the stage prematurely by wrestling guards and by acting as backup thrusters to Olive’s booty shaking. It’s hilarious, to be sure, but it’s also an unbelievably warm showing of unconditional love and support of this little girl and the preservation of her innocence in a room full of people seeking to age her before her time. And with that one moment, suddenly this trip of abject failure has become one of irrefutable triumph.
So Little Miss Sunshine does find a way to speak to the masses after all. Maybe the movie is telling us to find the joy in life, or to not take things too seriously. Maybe it just wants us to keep an open mind. Maybe it wants us to know that sometimes every single thing goes wrong but that one single thing going right can turn it all around. Whatever it is, it manages to tell an incredibly inclusive story, applicable to the lives of a great many people.
Viable Option 