i feel like we need to read this every year
Look, I know, OK? It was overpraised and “quirky” and everyone liked it so we—we, us, us, you know, the people who know better and earlier—can’t like it, right? (Because some quirky things this decade were bad, all quirky things this decade were bad! Uggggh.) But now that we have maybe a little distance from it, I hope we can all acknowledge that Little Miss Sunshine really is a hell of a movie. Aside from pointing to just how well it was written (read the script sometime if you get a chance), I would narrow in on one particular point. There is a character in this movie who is a dark, brooding teenage boy. He likes Neitzsche and is intelligent and special. But he is not the center of the movie. Instead, he is a running joke, being more or less relegated to Harpo. Instead of being taken seriously and focused on in order to make the movie seem “meaningful” to the kind of people who decide whether or not movies are meaningful (who tend to be, or have been, teenage boys who thought they were special), he is mercilessly made fun of. Maybe this lack of Seriousness dawned on us eventually and we turned on it (did we turn on it? am I making this up?), finding various ways around the basic sentiment that “it’s not like The Dark Knight.”
Instead, the moral and emotional center of the movie is the person pictured above: a little girl who loves beauty pageants, not because she wants to be a princess or because she needs approval or because her parents have pushed her into it as a way of validating her self-esteem, but because she thinks beauty pageants are awesome. Olive’s desire becomes the center of the film because all the other characters are beaten down, mopey and sullen or quietly desperate, and having a hard time seeing beyond their immediate circumstances. Olive is the only one who is enthusiastic, and so the ultimate message is not about the importance of family or the need to be different or anything else. It is, rather, this: enthusiasm wins, especially sincere enthusiasm about things that would not seem to merit it. This is a movie that acknowledges the awfulness of life without dwelling on it, and providing a way to get through it. This is very different from most of the other quirkfests, which tended to end on a note of resignation or failure—or worse, settling. (The one obvious exception would be Adventureland, another great little film that’s easy to overlook.) It was a hard decade to be realistically optimistic in, to sound sunny without sounding crazy, but Little Miss Sunshine did that, and it’s no small feat.
1000 times this
It’s an amazing movie but I think this analysis of it is terrible. I just don’t agree at all. Pretty much every point that is made is wrong in my mind
