Paulo Henrique retweetledi
"Little Miss Sunshine" is often remembered as a feel-good story about a dysfunctional family coming together, but almost every character ends the film in a worse position than where they began.
Richard spends the movie preaching his “nine steps” to success, only to watch his business dream collapse and be forced to confront the possibility that he is the very thing he fears most: a loser.
Sheryl begins already struggling to hold her family together, and by the end she has endured financial uncertainty, constant conflict, and the death of her father.
Frank enters the story after surviving a suicide attempt, having lost both the man he loved and the academic career around which he built much of his identity. The road trip does not magically fix any of that. His problems are still waiting for him when he gets home.
Dwayne has spent months refusing to speak, obsessively preparing for his dream of becoming a fighter pilot. Then he discovers that he is colour-blind, making the future he had built his entire life around impossible. His breakdown on the side of the road is one of the film’s most devastating moments.
Grandpa Edwin, perhaps the person who believes in Olive more fiercely than anyone else, dies halfway through the journey.
And Olive finally reaches the beauty pageant she has dreamed about, only to enter a world that makes painfully clear how little she fits its manufactured idea of what a young girl should look and act like.
Nothing is really “fixed” by the end of Little Miss Sunshine. Richard does not become successful. Dwayne does not get his dream back. Frank’s life is not suddenly restored. Grandpa is gone. Olive does not win.
What changes is that failure stops being something they have to face alone.
When Olive begins her ridiculous dance onstage and the family joins her, they are not celebrating victory. They are choosing each other in the middle of humiliation, grief, disappointment and failure.
Maybe that is why Little Miss Sunshine feels so uplifting despite everything that happens. It is not a story about life getting better.
It is a story about having people beside you when it doesn’t.
The Cinéprism@TheCineprism
20 years ago today, 'Little Miss Sunshine' was released, and lives were changed.
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