The greatest movie to ever exist
The movie Little Miss Sunshine celebrates 20th year anniversary at Sundance festival
By Hal Reed
“Little Miss Sunshine” is the best cinematic movie ever. Each shot is perfectly framed and carefully crafted. It should be shown in every film class to illustrate perfect visuals. This movie follows a dysfunctional family going across the states in their yellow Volkswagen.
The beginning of the movie illustrates, and depicts, each family member of the Hoover family. In the sequence, we have the band DeVotchKa on the soundtrack giving us “The Winner Is” song. Such beautiful instrumentals, particularly to listen to dissociate on the highway.
The opening scene shows a young girl trying to mimic a beauty pageant winner on the tv. Olive Hoover, our main character, is represented as a plump little girl who won a beauty pageant, by fault and can compete at the next higher competition level.
Her brother, Dwayne Hoover, is a teenager that is influenced by the philosophy of Fedrick Nietzsche, he takes a vow of silence until achieving his dream of becoming a test pilot for the Air Force.
Sheryl Hoover is the mother that is desperately trying to keep her family together and being the only bread winner. She picks up her brother Frank, played by Steve Carell, at the hospital after a suicide attempt. Carell is known as a great comedian actor but in this film, he really shows his true acting skills through his clinical depressed character.
Richard Hoover is the father, who opens with a monologue on his book he wrote about success and how it can only be achieved with persistence. When the lights come up, it shows the audience he was talking to was only four people. Then his father, Edwin Hoover, stayed with them after being kicked out of a retirement home due to his addiction to cocaine.
During their road trip to the Little Miss Sunshine Pageant, the family faces a series of setbacks and unexpected obstacles that reveal their personalities to highlight emotional struggles between each family member.
One of the first impactful scenes is when the family is sitting at the diner and Olive orders waffles “à la mode,” simply meaning she wants ice cream with her meal. Her father immediately turns it into a lesson, warning her that eating ice cream could make her fat and comparing her to beauty pageant winners who, in his view, are never overweight. But this makes a full circle when Olive asks a pageant winner about her favorite ice cream.
This scene highlights the father’s toxic “winner vs. loser” philosophy and how it clashes with Olive’s innocence. While she just wants to enjoy dessert, he frames food, body image and even childhood joy in terms of competition and societal standards. It exposes both his insecurity and the pressure he unintentionally puts on his daughter.
While Richard insists that success is a choice and failure is unacceptable, his inability to sell his book proves the opposite, reinforcing the film’s message that life is unpredictable and worth cannot be measured by achievement alone.
At the motel, Olive shares a room with her grandfather and opens up about her nerves for the pageant. She asks if she’s pretty, and he reassures her that she’s beautiful. Fighting back tears, she admits, “I don’t want to be a loser” and “Daddy hates losers,” revealing how deeply her father’s mindset has affected her. Her grandfather responds with one of the film’s most important lines: “You’re not a loser. A real loser is someone who’s so afraid of not winning they don’t even try.”
Not only does this scene stand strongly on its own, but it also carries added weight because, during their conversation, Edwin repeatedly rushes to the bathroom to get his next fix. This detail becomes tragic the next morning when Olive wakes her parents and tells them he won’t wake up.
The family later sits in the hospital lobby, where they receive the news that he died in his sleep. After learning that the required paperwork will take too long and cause them to miss the pageant, Richard refuses to give up. Instead, he comes up with the idea to take Edwin’s body with them and handle the situation later so Olive can still compete.
During the drive, Dwayne takes an eye test from a pamphlet that Olive had grabbed from the hospital waiting room, and learns he is colorblind. When Frank tells him this disqualifies him from becoming a pilot, his lifelong dream collapses, and he finally breaks his vow of silence in frustration. He only regains composure after Olive quietly hugs him, showing the simple emotional bond between them.
They finally arrive at the pageant just in time. This moment highlights Frank’s growth, as he rushes in ahead of everyone else to make sure Olive doesn’t miss her chance. His urgency shows a shift in his character, suggesting he has found something to care for in his life again.
Slowly, each family member realizes the crazy effects that come with beauty pageants and instantly want to protect Olive from competing. Ultimately she doesn’t end up winning, but getting disqualified. During her talent segment, she dances to the song “Super Freak” contradicting the messed up way of pageants over sexualizing at such a young age.
During Olive’s performance, instead of pulling her off stage, her entire family joins her. This moment symbolizes that despite their individual struggles and conflicts, they ultimately support one another and stand together as a family.
This year they celebrated the movie’s 20th year with a cast reunion, besides Steve Carell and the late actor Alan Arkin. The movie still holds up to the hype and its message showcase in the movie will be endless.
Little Miss Sunshine does more than contradict Richard’s philosophy, it shows a dysfunctional family finding unity while facing their personal struggles. Early in the trip, the yellow Volkswagen’s first gear breaks, forcing everyone to push the van until it reaches enough speed to shift to second. This becomes a powerful symbolism in the film, the family cannot move forward unless they all work together. The broken yellow van ultimately mirrors the Hoovers themselves; flawed and struggling, but still able to move forward as long as they do it together.