The Anatomy of Imperfection: Little Miss Sunshine

The Anatomy of Imperfection.

The opening of Little Miss Sunshine (Valerie Faris, Jonathan Dayton, 2006) pans out from Miss California collecting her crowning prize on a screen, to eight-year-old Olive (Abigail Breslin), who is seen sitting in a cellar with thick glasses on and a dumpy pigtail, mimicking the winner’s exact movements. Her intense desire to be that revered pulls taught across her face. I first watched Little Miss Sunshine when I was six. Dangling my stubby legs over the edge of my aunt’s red sofa, I nestled in between my brothers and cousins. Too young and exciteable, I was rarely a source of interest for them. But that day, we’d spent the afternoon coordinating a dance routine that involved the consecutive removing of twelve jumpers to the tune of Nelly’s ‘It’s Gettin’ Hot in Here’. As the film unfolded, I didn’t just relate to Olive; I thought I was her. Determined obliviousness in a frame slightly too big for her, and surrounded by older people who were out of step with her, I couldn’t believe how similar we were. Little Miss Sunshine lodged itself into favourite film status in the back of my mind. I assumed my kid brain had just related to the circumstances more than because of any intelligence in the film’s construction. But on a recent rewatch, I was struck by the smartness of Michael Arndt’s debut screenplay. As John Truby unpacked in his seminal text ‘The Anatomy of a Story’, all characters should be a variation of the same central moral dilemma. He argues it is a mistake to think of every personality as a separate island. This is what Arndt does so well: he draws each character from the same thematic network. In the case of Little Miss Sunshine, all of the characters hold overtly rigid concepts about winning. The family patriarch, Richard (Greg Kinnear), is a washed-up self-help guru who preaches about a complex process to avoid being a loser. His wife’s brother, Frank (Steve Carrell), is staying with the family after a failed suicide attempt. Richard insists to Olive that Frank is a loser because he ‘gave up on himself’. In his eyes, not winning is never an option. Frank, however, holds winning only as a past reality and 10

frequently stresses that he was once the preeminent Proust scholar in America. Olive’s brother Dwayne (Paul Dano) has taken a vow of silence until he’s old enough to join aviation school. For him, winning is a fixed point in the future. All of them define success against a measureless barometer of other people. For Dwayne it’s getting away from his family; for Frank, it’s his unrequited lover running off with the second-best Proust scholar; and for Richard, it’s the followers that he expects to have at the end of his program. Olive started doing the pageants because she loved the act of doing them, but the attitudes around her come to make her feel that win What makes Little Miss Sunshine so good? ning is the only acceptable reality. This is where Grandpa (Alan Arkin) comes in. While he first appears to be comic relief in the charismatic form of Alan Arkin, with his abundant ‘fuck yous’ and heroin snorting, he comes to symbo-lise the wise freedom that comes with fully embracing the present. The film’s most touching scene has an incredible performance from a teary-eyed Olive, worrying that competing will put her at risk of fulfilling her dad’s low opinion of losers. With the breezy but firm encouragement that I think we all crave, Grandpa tells her that losers are only people that are so afraid of not winning that they don’t even try. He doesn’t care about the external view of others. Having been kicked out of his luxury care home for his frequent sex and drug use, he clearly isn’t living the most sustainable way of life. But Grandpa becomes emblematic of the self-assured difference of the film’s underdog values that come to win out in the end. As a result, Little Miss Sunshine is more than a product of the individuals with in its web. As Arndt has said, the family unit is also essentially the film’s main protagonist. Each character is introduced with equal weight in the film’s opening sequence 11

Little Miss Sunshine (Valerie Faris, Jonathan Dayton, 2006) Evolving like one giant organism, they eventually come together from their dysfunction to support each other. The tragic beauty of Olive’s character was her slow realisation that the world might not perceive her as she thinks it does. And like me with my less inappropriate, but still incredibly weird, jumper routine, the apex of the film takes aim at the sexualisation of children in beauty pageants, with Olive dancing suggestively to Super Freak. Arndt’s script flits on the periphery of saying that just wanting something isn’t enough: the world also has to want it for you. But on the climactic cusp of letting these dominant values win, the family steps in to protect her. They all know what it’s like to lose something integral to their identity, and so in dancing on stage with her, the outrage of her disturbing dance is turned on its head to industry as whole. In showing Olive there is ultimately no ‘winning’ way to be, her sense of self is protected. Being the youngest in a family is hard. The only thing you can do is look to these people who are bungling through life just as much as you are. It is only as I get older that I realise how little my brothers understood how much I looked up to them. When I watched Little Miss Sunshine as a child, I might not have fully understood the poignancy that bisects Olive’s reality, but I was deeply aware of the love pulsing through the film’s core. Ultimately, that’s what Little Miss Sunshine comes to conclude: you can’t change what happens to you, but you can be there to show the people you love that regardless of whether they win or lose, they will always matter. Eve Smith