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 There are certain people of whom it is difficult to say anything which will at once throw them into relief—in other words, describe them graphically in their typical characteristics. These are they who are generally known as “commonplace people,” and this class comprises, of course, the immense majority of mankind. Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than real life itself. For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person’s nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine—. I think such an individual really does become a type o...
Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
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.”
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