Little Miss Sunshine: “I’m going backstage.”
Indie classic Little Miss Sunshine arrived on the scene in 2006 to instant praise. Following the reluctant road-trip of five tortured souls and one tirelessly cheerful little girl, and featuring an unforgettable malfunctioning VW camper van horn, Little Miss Sunshine covers both comedy and sadness in a charming little snapshot of the reality of family life that most people could at some point identify with (the possible exceptions being heroin abusing grandparents and corpse theft).
Given that the characters are continually struggling to appear normal when actually their worlds are slowly crumbling around them, almost everything about this movie – the dramatic and the funny – is underplayed in some way. But once they reach their destination – the titular Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant – the tone changes, the focus shifting away from the individuals and their relationships to the here and now of the pageant itself.
Seven year-old Olive (Abigail Breslin) is the only one whose dream has not yet been destroyed at some point on the journey, her naïve but unshakeable enthusiasm for performing at the pageant the one force that has kept the family going forwards. Once they are confronted with the disturbing sight of what the beauty pageant really involves, however, the doubts begin.
The viewer can see it, Olive’s parents can possibly reluctantly see it, but it isn’t until her brother Dwayne (Paul Dano) and Uncle Frank (Steve Carell) respond that something starts to happen about it. Having slipped in through a side door and reappeared almost immediately, what Frank and Dwayne saw of the spectacle unfolding on the stage could only have been extremely short, with not even the audience themselves seeing that actual moment. From just their faces, however – which suggest that they just stumbled into a room full of people machine gunning kittens – it is clear that it was enough. And with no preamble or change to his voice, Dwayne simply states “I’m going backstage,” before disappearing around the corner.
The pace of the movie has altered altogether by this point, but it is precisely this that allows us to see the groundwork that was somehow laid between the family members during this miserable, awkward trip finally begin to have meaning; with just three words, Dwayne’s response to the situation perfectly captures the point at which this family’s various private tragedies have faded away to leave a single united focus – to rescue Olive.
As it turns out, the events unfold in another direction – but in that moment we get all the themes that make this film the touching thing of beauty that it is, and that give such poignancy to the wonderful ending in which the family finally achieve total coordination in push-starting their dilapidated van: The pulling through from personal trauma, the ultimate loyalty that still lies between members of even the most ridiculously dysfunctional family, and the idea that people can simply be who they are and that, in the end, that’s enough.