The film Little Miss Sunshine has always stood out to me, ever since I first watched it back in my junior year of high school. I loved all of the characters and how human they felt, and I loved seeing how their stories played out. They ate their takeout family dinners on paper plates, drinking from McDonald’s collectible cups, and their house was fairly cluttered and well-lived-in. Every rewatch always brought an overwhelming amount of nostalgia and comfort, and it very quickly became a personal favorite. My most recent rewatch, though, allowed me to sit and watch the movie in a different way, giving it my full and undivided attention. I wanted to figure out all the reasons why I loved this movie so much and why I encourage everyone I come across to watch it, including you! What was it about this move that made me feel so comforted when everything for these characters seemingly fell apart?
Little Miss Sunshine is a captivating film, following the dysfunctional Hoover family as they travel hundreds of miles so that ten-year-old Olive can follow her dream of winning a beauty pageant. This journey is far from easy, and it seems that anything that could go wrong eventually does. From running into exes to having to run and push their car in order for it to start driving, nothing goes right. Each and every character faces a challenge that sets them off their original course, the dreams they visualized and dedicated time to were being taken away from them right before our eyes.
These dreams aren’t being taken away lightly either. It’s some of their identity being stripped away, goals that they’ve worked so hard to achieve, and all of it comes down to close to nothing. They go back home with none of them winners, and none of them accomplishing the dreams they set out to do. This fate is something that not a single character from this movie is exempt from. But somehow, despite all of the trials, this family overcomes it all. Except it doesn’t come from winning.
What Was Learned?
Richard, the father in this movie, spends the whole movie complaining about losers’ dreams of getting his book on this topic published. He criticizes and demeans anyone he deems a loser, yet by the end of the movie, his book remains unpublished, and he realizes it’ll never change. Dwayne, their son who seems to be the Black Sheep of the family, had taken a vow of silence for over a year just to be able to have the chance to fly planes, and he finds out this dream would be deemed impossible due to being colorblind. Even ten-year-old Olive, the hopeful daughter who started the journey in the first place, doesn’t come back a winner. In fact, she comes back unable to compete in any other pageant ever again in the state of California.
By the end, it’s very evident that none of their happy endings have come true, their wild dreams aren’t fulfilled, and the van is still broken when they make the journey back home. It feels crazy that this is a comforting movie for me. I understand why it is crazy, but it’s comforting to me because of the real lessons that they learned along the way. Just because they didn’t get what they originally wanted doesn’t mean that their journey was a waste. Each character comes out the other side with a newfound sense of peace, even if it doesn’t look like what they initially thought it would. Not only is this peace seen through them as individuals, but them as a family. They go back home more connected, with more laughter, more conversations, and more feelings of contentment than before.
What Can We Take Away?
To me, that’s what makes this movie so special and important. There are so many different lessons that one can take away, but to me, Little Miss Sunshine wasn’t really about winning versus losing. I think it was about finding good in things, not going the way you think they will. Sometimes we lose what we think are the most important things we have, and life goes on, anyway. We could spend our whole lives being upset over those instances, or we could come to accept them while laughing with people we love.
So many other incredible lessons can be pulled from this movie, and I could spend such a long time explaining them all. But that little lesson can bring the greatest amount of peace, and it’s something that is needed now, especially in this stage of life. I have so many goals and expectations, and I want so badly for them to come true. I try my best and work hard, but at the end of the day, nothing is guaranteed. So many parts of our lives might not be what we always expected them to be, and that can be absolutely devastating to realize. But even through all that devastation, there is always something good, and remembering that can help us more than winning or losing.
A scene from this film that always stood out to me was of Dwayne and Frank, his uncle, who’d been suffering from mental health issues, together on the pier. Dwayne wishes his suffering away, and Frank reminds him of just how important suffering can be because of how much you learn from it. Maybe we have dreams, and we fail greatly at them, or maybe fate gets in the way, and it just doesn’t pan out. Whatever it may be, it’s important to understand that it never means that you lost. There is always something to learn from hard times, and there truly is a beauty to it; you just have to be able to stop and look for it.