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Rating: "You know who the losers are? The losers are those who are so afraid of not winning that they don't even try." - Edwin Hoover (Alan Arkin)
In 2006, the directorial duo Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, already internationally famous for their work in music video production, made their debut on the big screen with the film "Little Miss Sunshine". The film tells the tragicomic journey of the Hoover family, who travel from Albuquerque to California to allow young Olivia (Abigail Breslin) to participate in a beauty pageant. The group consists of the family head Richard Hoover (Greg Kinnear), his wife Sheryl (Toni Collette), son Dwayne (Paul Dano), Uncle Frank (Steve Carell), grandfather Edwin (Alan Arkin), and the aforementioned Olivia.
With an increasingly fast and rising rhythm typical of an on the road film, probably also influenced by the directors' previous works, the journey gives each member of this extended family the opportunity to redefine themselves and their lives. Between one more or less amusing episode and another, the story is enveloped in a shroud of failure, which almost completely covers the characters on screen, each taken individually.
Richard Hoover is indeed in search of a publishing success that never comes, with his book outlining "The Nine Steps" to ensure success, engaged in theorizing a systematic method for self-realization that he himself cannot practice. Sheryl seems resigned to the role of a wife caught between boredom and despair, capable of serving only pre-cooked dinners and waiting for her husband's success. Frank is considered the greatest scholar of writer Marcel Proust in the United States but watches helplessly as everything he built crumbles, after being defeated in love, and even fails in his suicide attempt. Dwayne has taken a vow of silence, promising to keep it until he joins the Air Force, but breaks it when, during the trip, he realizes he is colorblind and cannot achieve his dream. Finally, Olivia is too "authentic" and "too much of a child" (as is right) to win a beauty pageant. The grandfather Edwin, well portrayed by Alan Arkin, who won an Oscar in 2007, raises another theme within the film, that of generational confrontation: the character of Edwin represents another generation, one that, unlike his son Richard's, didn't worry so much about outlining "nine steps" to achieve success, and probably never cared about success in general. A generation with which the subsequent ones in the story inevitably confront themselves, and whose "weight" they carry with them in the van they travel in.
The journey will serve to make all protagonists aware of their failures, to face them, overcome them, and perhaps even exploit them to improve their lives: only by recognizing his color blindness and seeing his dream of piloting a plane shatter does Dwayne begin speaking again and lay the groundwork for a new beginning. In light of all this, failure becomes almost a necessary step, the full acknowledgment of it a kind of "palingenesis," and the consequent sufferings become what can "make us who we are," just as it did for Marcel Proust.
The film's final scene is emblematic, as it doesn't matter if the publishing success doesn't come, if our color blindness makes us unable to pilot a plane, or if our "genuineness" is an obstacle to winning a glossy beauty pageant; what matters is doing what we love, preferably with someone by our side to help push and "start" the rickety van we've chosen (or are forced) to travel in.
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