By now you may have heard about Little Miss Sunshine, the small Indy movie that could. What started out as a festival crowd pleaser had such great ticket sales for such a small project that it eventually earned itself a wide release slot. I didn’t get to watch it until after it had garnered an unexpected amount of awards and profits but since the movie wasn’t pure hype there is no penalty to showing up to the party late, unlike other cases such as the Blair Witch Project.
Everything starts when small town girl Olive (Abigail Breslin) is invited to participate in the Little Miss Sunshine competition, apparently the big league of beauty pageants for little girls. For the rest of the movie she will be trapped in a VW bus with her extremely dysfunctional family as they make the trip down to
Comedic situations play out sporting a sick devotion to Murphy’s Law, one worse case scenario after another. Before long the Bus is barely functional, the marriage is falling apart and more than a few egos have been shattered. The most disturbing source of humor of course is the pageant itself, which displays rows of little girls slathered in makeup and wearing extremely inappropriate costumes. While it is not the first time the argument has been made that pop idols and beauty queens are terrible role models for little girls, it works perfectly here.
The other important theme is our obsession with winning, with being successful, and thus being loved by others. Greg Kinnear has a self-help system of his own on how to be a winner and constantly grates everyone with his shallow judgmental advice. Perhaps the funniest moment in the movie is when he tries to use scare tactics to keep his daughter from eating ice cream, threatening the little girl with obesity and a life of loserdom. Yup, this movie made me HATE Greg which is a major feat; he is one of my all time favorite actors.