My Life at the Movies 5.19.09: 2006 - Little Miss Sunshine

Posted by DC Perry on 05.19.2009

Losers are people who are so afraid of not winning, they don't even try.

2006 saw the successful revitalization of one classic franchise (Casino Royale) and the unsuccessful revitalization of another (Superman Returns). It gave us great subtitled, Sacha Baron Cohen comedies in Talladega Nights and Borat, and excellent children's movies in Cars, Happy Feet, and Over the Hedge. But the best movie of the year is subtle, understated, and fights for honesty in a way that cuts through all the phony.


2006 at a Glance

US President: George W. Bush
Median annual salary: $47,200
Gallon of gas: $2.53
Dozen eggs: $1.53
New house: $250,800
New car: $27,500
Movie ticket: $8.00
Boston Red Sox: 86-76, third place, American League East
Me: Attempting NaNoWriMo. Failing.

After a failed suicide attempt inspired by the loss of his lover, the loss of his teaching position, and the success of his academic rival, Frank Ginsberg (Steve Carell) moves in with his sister Sheryl Hoover (Toni Collette) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She makes up a bed for him with her 15-year-old son Dwayne (Paul Dano), who hangs giant pictures of Friedrich Nietzsche on his wall and has taken a vow of silence until he is accepted into the Air Force Academy. Her 7-year-old daughter Olive (Abigail Breslin) obsesses over tapes of beauty pageants and spends her days with her heroin-snorting grandfather Edwin (Alan Arkin) practicing dance routines. None of this sits well with Sheryl's husband Richard (Greg Kinnear), an aspiring motivational speaker who pounces on the phone each time it rings hoping to learn that his nine step self help system has sold to a publisher.


Welcome to hell.

When a call does come during an awkward dinner of take-out chicken and Frank's explanation for his suicide attempt to a fascinated Olive, it is to tell Olive that the winner of a regional beauty pageant in which she placed second has been forced to abdicate her crown, which means Olive is qualified for the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in Redondo Beach, California. Unfortunately, the pageant is in two days, and since Aspiring Motivational Speaker doesn't come with a six-figure salary, there isn't money for plane tickets and a hotel stay. Sheryl can't drive a stick, Edwin insists on coaching Olive, and Frank can't be left alone, so the entire family piles into their awesome yellow Volkswagen Microbus and hits the 800-mile road.


Where's Olive?

After a breakfast stop, during which Richard does his best to continue to undermine Olive's self confidence by criticizing her fattening meal, the Microbus's clutch burns out. Since there's no way to get the necessary parts for a repair before the beauty pageant, the family opts for the mechanic's suggested workaround – pushing the bus and starting it in third gear, since the clutch isn't necessary to shift into fourth, and piling in at a dead sprint. This means stopping only when necessary, which to Richard includes poor reception during a call from his would-be book agent Stan Grossman (Bryan Cranston). While Richard calls Stan back on a pay phone, Edwin sends Frank inside the convenience store with money for pornography. Frank glibly selects several particularly filthy magazines, but his bravado crumbles when his ex-lover Josh (Justin Shilton) recognizes him from across the store. He cheerfully fills him in on his relationship with Larry Sugarman (Gordon Thompson), the aforementioned academic rival, but the conversation grinds to an awkward halt when Josh sees the stack of boobs on the counter behind Frank.


It was silly. It was very silly.

That night in their hotel, Olive and Edwin rehearse while Richard and Sheryl fight over the failure of his motivational program to find a publisher. Resolute, Richard leaves to confront Grossman over his failure to push his motivational system, only to discover that it was Richard's lack of success, not the system itself, that killed any possible deal. Humbled and questioning his script for the first time, Richard returns to the hotel and goes to bed. The next morning, he and Sheryl are awakened by Olive, who informs them that Edwin won't wake up.


I'm madly in love with you and it's not because of your brains or your personality.

The bureaucracy surrounding Edwin's death threatens to derail the family's trip to the Little Miss Sunshine pageant, and after the ordeal they have already been through, Richard is not about to allow that. Rather than fill out the various forms required to legally transport Edwin's body from California to Arizona, he organizes a body snatching, stuffing the body into the back of the bus and making off for Redondo Beach. The bus's stuck horn attracts the attention of a police officer, who is distracted by Edwin's pornography before he can discover the corpse directly beneath it. Olive gives Dwayne an eye test she snagged in the hospital, and he discovers, much to the detriment of his Air Force aspirations, that he is color blind. (As someone who didn't find out he was color blind until high school, I can vouch for the plausibility of this plot development. Of course, by them my jet pilot dreams were long since dashed.) This leads to a full-blown meltdown, moving Dwayne to abandon his self-imposed silence for shouted insults and scathing hatred for his family. When Sheryl can't calm him, Olive steps in.



Richard careens the bus into the parking lot of the Little Miss Sunshine pageant, and after some debate, reasoning, and begging with the fussbudget organizer who refuses to register Olive four minutes after the 3:00 deadline, Olive is signed in and off to the dressing room. The artificial atmosphere of the pageant is heightened after the raw, barrier-breaching road trip the family has endured, but Olive is here to compete, and compete she does. The other girls are disturbingly sexualized and professional, in sharp contrast to pudgy, bespectacled Olive, and the sneers and tongue-clucking from the pageant moms and contestants. Richard and Dwayne demand that Sheryl pull Olive out of the competition, since she should be protected from ridicule. Olive is having none of it, though, and she gets ready to go on.


I'd like to dedicate this to my grandpa, who showed me these moves.

Olive hits the stage and reveals the dance routine she learned from Grandpa Edwin – a full blown striptease set to Rick James' "Super Freak". Naturally, this disgusts the pageant crowd, who prefer their hypersexualized children in a very specific vintage and have no room for Olive's routine. Since they can't protect her from the crowd's judgment, Richard, Frank, and Dwayne stand up and dance along, cheering as Olive dances with innocent and oblivious joy. The officials attempt to remove her, prompting the entire family to take the stage and dance with Olive, which clears the room and leads to a restraining order against Olive's entry in California's beauty pageants.


She's kicking ass!

Little Miss Sunshine is all about the struggle between the real and the artificial. Richard's desire to sanitize his life threatens to destroy it. He craves the trappings of an objectively successful life, and he'll create it at the cost of his family. Life is made up, according to Richard's nine step system, of winners and losers; if you want to win badly enough, you will. The corollary, of course, is quickly picked up by his children - if you fail, you are a loser, and losers are unacceptable. So Olive needs to win pageants and give up ice cream, and Dwayne needs to create his own artificial reality centered on Nietzsche and jets and refusal to speak. Frank's broken, blunt description of his suicide attempt terrifies Richard, and he tries to frame the conversation for Olive by putting Frank in the Loser box.


Listen to me, I got no reason to lie to you, don't make the same mistakes I made when I was young.

Olive and Edwin are the only people who are beyond the artificial trappings, Olive because she is too young and innocent, Edwin because he is too old to care. Edwin's death is the final catalyst that brings the family together, forcing them to drop their façades and accept their humanity. Frank's study of Proust is no accident – Little Miss Sunshine wants us to embrace suffering as the condition in which we best experience our humanity. Cramming our chaotic, disorganized, haphazard souls into tightly-organized, unworkable, self-help books not only fails, it's enormously destructive and dishonest. Over-processed talent shows have nothing on reckless, joyful, troubling dance.


Fuck beauty pageants.