Little Miss Sunshine

A suicidal Proust expert, a drug-addled grandfather, a self-help guru who can't get anyone to listen and his frustrated wife, and a teenager who hates everyone and has taken a vow of silence travel the road to California in an old VW bus that needs a clutch so that the family's youngest can take part in a beauty contest. In a nutshell, that is Little Miss Sunshine. But the nutshell can be deceiving. Little Miss Sunshine is a film filled with grace in a world of broken people.

The Hoover family really is a group of misfits: Richard has a nine step program to be a winner at life, but he is a complete failure; his wife Sheryl is busy trying to hold everyone and everything together; Richard's father has been kicked out of the retirement community he lived in because he'd been snorting heroin; Sheryl's brother Frank has just been released from the hospital following a suicide attempt precipitated by his lover abandoning him for a rival Proust scholar; Richard and Sheryl's sullen son Dwayne has set his sights on going to the Air Force Academy and flying jets and has vowed not to speak until he's reached his goal; their young daughter Olive is obsessed with beauty pageants even though she is very plain. This bunch really doesn't like each other much -- they don't even like themselves.

Because Olive is suddenly eligible for the regional Little Miss Sunshine competition due to a disqualification, the group takes off from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach, California, on a deadline. Soon they discover the clutch is out, so whenever they start the car they all have to get out and push, and once going, they can't slow down.

That van serves as a metaphor for the family. It's a mess and it just keeps getting worse, and nobody has the time or the ability to fix it. How it's managed to stay together so long is hard to imagine. It just keeps rolling along, and in time it will arrive at its destination in spite of everything that is wrong with it.

Throughout the film, the various dreams of the family members are destroyed -- Richard's book deal, Frank's career as well as his relationship, Dwayne's future. One by one their hopes fall by the wayside. That may be one of the reasons they are so intent on getting Olive to the Little Miss Sunshine contest, so that she can at least have her dream.

When they get there, however, they discover that that dream may not be worthy of her. When we see these pre-pubescent beauty contestants with their big hair and full makeup, we realize just how empty Olive's dream has been. The scenes at the pageant are uncomfortably eerie as they exhibit an almost pedophilic atmosphere. As we watch the Hoovers struggle with what is happening on and back stage, we realize that even this collection of misfits is probably more together than the culture that encourages young girls to take on the accoutrements of sex to get ahead in life.

In spite of all the ways each of the family members is mired in the failure of his or her own life, there is a bond between them that allows the whole to be far more than the sum of its parts.

In one scene, as the family tries to deal with Dwayne's devastation, off in the distance is a faded billboard that reads, "United We Stand". That sentiment has faded in the Hoover household, but it is still there underneath all the strife and self-centeredness. It is the potential of what they can be to one another that fills the film with hope -- hope that is more powerful than all the adversity that has filled everyone's lives.

Frank explains to Dwayne how Proust discovered that it was the times of adversity in his life that gave life its meaning. The Hoover family certainly has its share of problems. But by the end we see that there is room for them to grow and find the meaning the hardship can bring.

Perhaps we should see that we all spend time in that bus with a bad clutch. We have to help to get it going, even when we don't want to be on the journey. We have to run to jump in, even when we don't want to be with the other travelers. We have enough trouble without having to spend our lives with a busload of broken people. But in the end, it is the journey we never wanted that takes us to the places we find love.