This is one of those films that, when you finish watching, you are left with a big, warm feeling inside your chest.
Little Miss Sunshine is about a family on a road trip to help their little girl participate in a beauty pageant. Every adult in the family has already succumbed to disillusionment, each of their own kind. But at the center is little Olive, who, despite being surrounded by such cynical adults, hasn’t yet absorbed the language of winners and losers, with her innocent sincerity persevering.
The film presents the world as it is, where value is measured through self-help formulas and polished performances, where rules of acceptability and desirability are even imposed on children. Ultimately, it does what optimistic movies do best — offer a meaningful moment when people stop chasing the standards and choose each other instead.
This is not a light film, by any means. It talks about big, bad, scary things – failure, unfulfilled aspirations, rejection, suicide, and death. And it does it with so much care and lightness.
It’s funny, bright, colourful, radically kind and deeply melancholic.
There is just something so warm and tender about a bunch of broken, defeated grown ups pulling it together through increasingly messed up circumstances to keep a little kid’s dream alive. And through that, reignite the ember of sensitivity and hope – the ability to dream and believe – within themselves.
Life can be terrible. You will want to give up and run away (often). But nothing and no one is irredeemable. And a good sense of humour goes a looong way.