Brehm Center

            Through oversized glasses, seven-year old Olive Hoover had been watching beauty pageants and dreaming of being a beauty queen long before she got the call saying she had made it into the regional finals of the Little Miss Sunshine beauty contest.  Listening to the recorded message, Olive breaks into screams of delight which in turn pierce the fractured world of her family. For you see, everyone in Olive’s family is dealing (or not) with their own personal demons. They are such radically self-absorbed souls that they don’t even know that they are in need of each other.

            Olive’s dad, Richard (Greg Kinnear), is a wannabe motivational speaker who can’t motivate anyone, let alone his family. Her mom, Sheryl (Toni Collette) is frenzied by just trying to keep the family from drifting out to sea forever. Olive’s brother, Dwayne (Paul Dano), is perpetually angry and doesn’t speak. He writes his lament against the world on pads of paper.  Her uncle, Frank (Steve Carell), who has just failed at suicide (because of lost love and lost stature as a Proust scholar) needs to be protected from himself. Finally, Olive’s grandpa (Alan Arkin) loves her dearly and has spent hours helping her choreograph and practice her competition routine. However, he is also a profanely cranky drug user.

            Given the above description, this family sounds like a cynical film stereotype of the American family.  Surrounded by such “losers” how could Olive (Abigail Breslin—grown up a bit from her waif-like role in Signs in 2002) stand a chance of making it to, and through, a beauty competition?  But her dad insists that the whole family take the road trip from Albuquerque to California to help Olive become the winner she is meant to be. As viewers we can only imagine that her dream is about to become a nightmare.

            With the reluctant family members, we are ushered into an old yellow VW bus for the journey--as in all road trip films the emphasis is on the inner journey. Through dark comedy, authentic zaniness, setbacks, breakdowns, intimate moments, and lovely surprises, the Hoovers, one by one, must let go and die to self (and their ideas of self) to find themselves authentically as individuals and as a family. Each family member is forced to deal with their own failure and the recognition that family is that place where one is loved and supported even in the midst and in spite of failure. Ferociously tender moments spring forth from the entire family’s love for Olive. This love grows and binds them together through their road trip “from hell.” 

            While the ensemble cast is brutally funny, the adult actors aren’t what make the viewer vicariously and viscerally join in the journey. Rather, it is the way in which Breslin is achingly real in her joy, sorrow, confusion, determination, and yearning. She brings neither an over-saccharinized nor overly precocious air to her role. Rather, her portrayal is an emotionally vulnerable one that perhaps only a child could do. She helps the viewer feel that love really can cast out fear.

            The journey is long and the disciplines of love, patience, kindness, honesty, compassion, humor and losing are at times difficult. And the Hoovers aren’t alone. From the desert saints to St. Catherine of Sienna and Sor Juana to St. Francis and St. Bartolomé de Las Casas to Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mother Theresa or to Cathy’s Pasadena prayer partners, Sally, Virginia and Gene, many are on the journey. A journey first walked by our Lord Jesus Christ.  “Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear…We love because he first loved us.”   (I John 4:17-19)

            If the journey through hilarious humor, personal transformation, family dynamics, and the power of love isn’t enough, the film also takes on societal excesses. For by the end, the Hoovers’ genuine faith in each other does battle with our culture’s hyper-individualistic mentality and obsession with winning. And in days filled with lingering news reports of the murder of child beauty queen contestant, Jon Bonet Ramsey, such a critique and resistance movement is timely.