And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
Hope
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
Erich Fromm
The opening montage introduces us to the Hoover family one at a time: Olive (Abigail Breslin) is the aspiring beauty queen. Her dad Richard (Greg Kinnear) is an astonishingly unsuccessful motivational speaker. He’s pathologically obsessed with winning because he’s never tasted it himself. Olive’s mom Sheryl (Toni Collette) values family above all else, and her nerves are fraying over trying to hold this one together.
Grandpa (Alan Arkin), Olive’s coach, spends hours working on her dance routine with her. Grandpa has been kicked out of a retirement home, for sleeping around and for snorting heroin. His philosophy is that you’d have to be crazy to do smack when you’re young, but when you get old, you’d be crazy not to.
Uncle Frank (Steve Carell), Sheryl’s brother, is the Number One Proust scholar in the world, and has just attempted suicide because he fell in love with a graduate student who dumped him for the Number Two Proust scholar in the world. And Olive’s teenage brother Dwayne (Paul Dano) hasn’t spoken in nine months. He’s not depressed, exactly; he’s been reading Nietzsche and has taken a vow of silence while training to get into flight school. Plus, he hates everybody.
After our initial introductions, “Little Miss Sunshine” does something quite extraordinary: It gives us a single, nearly 20-minute scene built around a family dinner of takeout fried chicken in which we learn everything about Hoover family dynamics. It’s a daring move that establishes the movie’s characters and comedic tone, and then … road trip!
“Little Miss Sunshine” shows us a world in which there’s a form, a brochure, a procedure, a job title, a diet, a step-by-step program, a career path, a prize, a retirement community, to quantify, sort, categorize and process every human emotion or desire. Nothing exists that cannot be compartmentalized or turned into a self-improvement mantra about “winners and losers.”
The road to the screen was nearly as arduous as the Hoovers' trip to California.
Development Hell: Michael Arndt wrote the script in 2000. It took five years to secure funding, with the project being dropped by Focus Features before being picked up by Marc Turtletaub.
Sundance Sensation: The film premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, where it sparked one of the biggest bidding wars in the festival's history. Fox Searchlight eventually purchased the distribution rights for approximately $10.5 million—a record at the time.
The Van: Five identical VW Microbuses were used during filming to accommodate different camera angles and the various stages of mechanical decay.
The Soundtrack
The music is integral to the film's "Indie" identity.
DeVotchKa: The Denver-based gypsy-punk band provided the core of the score. Their song "How It Ends" provides the emotional backbone for the film’s more contemplative moments.
Sufjan Stevens: The inclusion of "Chicago" during the departure from Albuquerque perfectly captures the bittersweet feeling of a journey beginning.
Academy Awards: Won Best Original Screenplay (Michael Arndt) and Best Supporting Actor (Alan Arkin).
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