Travel Films Week: Protecting Olive in ‘Little Miss Sunshine’

Look around… this place is fucked! I don’t want these people judging Olive—fuck them! You’re the mom—you’re supposed to protect her! Everyone is gonna laugh at her, Mom… please don’t let her do this. Look, she’s not a beauty queen. She’s just not.

So says Dwayne to his mother Sheryl moments before his sister Olive hits the stage for the talent portion of the pageant that gives Little Miss Sunshine its title. Olive and Little Miss Sunshine are who and what pile the extended Hoover family into a yellow VW van and carry them across 800 miles from New Mexico to California. In the process, the Hoovers lose dreams and careers, gear clutches and horn capabilities, not to mention the heroin-snorting Grandpa. Dwayne’s outburst comes at the near-end of a trip filled with heartache and disappointment (often simultaneously gut-wrenching and hilarious), and not only because he recognizes the damage participating in the contest might cause to his younger sister. He also expresses the collective fear of the male Hoovers who have generally, through their own failures, come to see (and protect) Olive as a symbol of personal redemption.

Little Miss Sunshine is like many classic road trip films in that the trip itself is a vehicle (pun intended) for the characters to learn something about one another, about themselves, and/or to come to a kind of acceptance of one another, and of themselves, by the film’s end. And Little Miss Sunshine’s characters certainly have a lot to learn because, like most of us, they are deeply and, in some cases tragically, flawed.

Olive’s dad Richard Hoover (Greg Kinnear) is a failing motivational speaker (a complete contradiction); brother Dwayne (Paul Dano) is in teenage-boy training to become a jet pilot (which later goes down the tubes when it’s discovered that he’s colorblind); Uncle Frank (Steve Carell), the “number one highly-regarded Proust scholar” in America, is recovering from an attempted suicide after his love interest, a graduate student, dumps him for the “number two highly-regarded Proust scholar” in America; Grandpa Edwin (Alan Arkin) is a heroin addict who’s been kicked out of his retirement community and has an abiding love of women, porn, and Rick James (and has, possibly, a knack for choreography); and then there’s mom Sheryl (Toni Collette), whose only major flaw seems to be furtively smoking cigarettes (and possibly marrying a failed motivational speaker). Olive (Abigail Breslin) and the pageant represent the movement toward something better, something successful (by literally moving toward the land of sunshine, California), even when it’s clear to everyone that Olive is just not a beauty queen, as Dwayne says. It’s not that she is a real contender that drives the Hoovers toward redemption. It’s the symbolic value of her possible success in the type of contest that society sanctions as a visible indicator of success (however troubling or, well, foolish a beauty contest is as an indicator of success for young girls and women). In other versions of these contests—careers, dreams of careers—Richard, Frank, and Dwayne, in particular, have failed.

Olive as a symbol of redemption (and the need to protect her as such) is established early in the film, when the frazzled Sheryl arrives home with Frank, and the family sits down to a working-mom meal of a bucket of fried chicken, salad, and Sprite Zero. Everyone else seems suited (or apathetic) enough to ignore the bandages on Frank’s wrists, but not Olive. She looks at Frank, gasps, and exclaims, “What happened to your arms?” Richard changes the subject to Olive’s pageant dance routine, but Frank interrupts, saying he’s had an accident and shifts the conversation to Dwayne’s vow of silence. Olive, however, insists. Frank says it’s “okay” to talk about it, which leads Sheryl to indicate that she’s “okay” with talking about it (she’s “pro-honesty”) if Frank is. After Frank permits Sheryl to tell Olive that he attempted suicide, which she does, Richard flips, suggests that it’s not an appropriate conversation to have at dinner, and “shushes” Olive. She’s nonplussed, however, and poignantly asks why Frank would want to kill himself.

Professional pusher of motivational success that he is, Richard is having none of it. After listening to Frank’s building tale of unrequited love and academic failure, he spins the story into his own type of motivational-speak, interpreting Frank’s narrative as a series of “foolish choices” and “giving up on himself” for Olive. On the one hand, the interpretation is a way—albeit a clumsy, ineffective, and completely ridiculous one—to package the “why” of an attempted suicide to a seven-year-old. On the other hand, it’s a clear reflection of the underlying fear of failure that Richard himself is facing in the attempted sell of his “Refuse to Lose / 9 Steps” program (which does, indeed, fail). Richard may not realize this consciously, but as he spins Olive’s desire to compete into a similar “winner or loser” narrative to that of Frank’s, the family, as well as the audience, does—especially since the Hoovers can hardly afford to take the trip. Green-lighting the road trip is Richard’s way of explicitly protecting Olive’s dream and implicitly protecting his own.

The reasons for the Hoovers to protect Olive are not always as selfish as those that Richard might have for protecting her (and, on occasion, they have to protect Olive from her father’s philosophy). In fact, the literal protection of Olive from the social pressures that break us down as adults is often incredibly touching, as it is in the diner scene wherein Olive orders her waffles “a la mode-ee.” Although Sheryl questions Olive’s choice of ice cream on the grounds of it being so early in the morning, Richard objects because he’s still got his eye on her success (as a beauty queen specifically, but replace the pageant with anything else and he’d likely have a similar objection). He breaks into a patronizing lesson on how ice cream comes from cream, which comes from cows, and notes that “cream has a lot of fat in it.” Sheryl, bless her, knows where he’s going with this and mutters under her breath “Richh-eerd.” As usual, Richard turns Sheryl’s earlier “pro-honesty” defense of telling Olive about Frank’s suicide attempt against her (“she’s gonna find out anyway”). When Olive asks what she might find out, Richard replies, “Well, when you eat ice cream, the fat in the ice cream becomes fat in the body.”

To her credit—and displaying the role she plays in the protection of her daughter—Sheryl looks at Olive and says, “I just want you to understand that it’s okay to be skinny and it’s okay to be fat, if that’s what you wanna be. Whatever you want, it’s okay.” While Olive is processing this, Richard asks Olive to consider whether beauty queens are “skinny or fat,” to which she quietly replies “They’re skinny, I guess.” And Sheryl shoots Richard a death-ray stare as the waitress comes over and serves Olive her “a la mode-ee” side dish.

“Does anyone want my ice cream?” Olive sadly asks.

Grandpa to the rescue. “Yeah, I’d like a little…” he says, and then he invites everyone else to have some, as well, until Olive protests “Wait! Stop! Don’t eat it all…” and digs in. (And Sheryl cuts Richard’s attempted interruption of this as Dwayne shoots a spitball through a straw directly into Richard’s face.) Taking their cue from Sheryl, Grandpa, Dwayne, and Frank are not only protecting Olive’s desire to eat ice cream; they are ultimately protecting her right to make her own choices and to disregard what society (a patriarchal society represented by Richard, maybe?) tells her to choose.

This particular scene foreshadows the protection the Hoover men give Olive during her dance performance during the talent portion of Little Miss Sunshine. Having made it to California and only losing one person (poor Grandpa), the Hoovers have everything invested in Olive, including the emotional toll their own failures have taken on them. Olive’s routine to Rick James’ “Super Freak,” choreographed by the recently departed Grandpa, is the film’s true highlight because it does so much in a few minutes: it makes explicit the sexualized undertones of the child glitz pageant world (Olive might be shaking her bootie and doing the ever-lovable “growl crawl,” but the little dolls in their make-up and teased hair represent something similar on a different frequency); it provides the context through which the Hoovers are able to pull together and to accept themselves as they are; but it also provides the moment when Richard, as well as Frank and Dwayne, are really able to protect Olive for who she is and what she’s chosen. With the head pageant judge in a tizzy over the routine, Richard jumps on stage to protect Olive from being pulled off, but instead of quietly suggesting to his daughter that it’s time to go, he begins dancing with her (and is joined by the rest of the Hoovers in quick succession).

The Hoover boys may not like what the pageant represents, which they become clearly aware of once they arrive, and it’s not about protecting Olive as a symbol anymore. It’s about representing her choice to be in the pageant, whether she’s truly a contender or not.

Which brings me back to the quotation from Dwayne I opened with.

Dwayne and Richard are now mentally awake enough to be concerned about Olive competing in the show; they’ve now seen the polished contestants strut and pose for the judges, and they know she’s not made of that stuff. As Dwayne points out, she’s just not. At first flustered by the sudden concern toward Olive, Sheryl finally explains to them: 

Olive is who she is. She has worked so hard, she’s poured everything into this. We can’t just take it away from her—we can’t! I know you wanna protect her… but we gotta let Olive be Olive. 

Like in the diner scene when she tells Olive she can be skinny or fat or whatever she wants to be, Sheryl has been protecting Olive all along—not because she herself is missing something, not because she’s failed personally, but because she recognizes the importance of a little girl being able to be, well, who she is. Sheryl isn’t your typical pageant mom… she’s not a “pageant mom” at all. She’s far removed from those types of moms you see on shows like TLC’s Toddlers and Tiaras, women who put out big bucks for high-teased hair pieces, spray tans, and “flippers” that transform mere babies into miniature adult likenesses, who act out routines for their daughters to follow from the audience, who train, coach, and, sometimes quite literally, push these girls toward the stage. In fact, Sheryl is clearly removed from the process in a positive sense: from the moment she hears the phone message from her sister, Cindy, indicating that Olive is eligible to compete in Little Miss Sunshine (and rolls her eyes at the revelation that the first-place winner set to compete was disqualified because of “diet pills or something”), Sheryl is proud and supportive of Olive no matter what. She’s not pushy, but she’s not disconnected, either. She is being what Dwayne reminds her she is—“the mom”—by allowing Olive the freedom of her own choices.

Letting “Olive be Olive”—and learning to protect the choice Olive can make to be herself—is ultimately what allows the Hoovers to accept themselves and one another. We don’t know what life will be like for the Hoovers once they return to New Mexico, but one thing is for certain by the film’s end: they’ve broken through a lot more than the barrier gate in the parking lot of the Redondo Beach Inn.

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Melissa Richard is a part-time English instructor at High Point University in the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina. She writes about work and women in nineteenth-century Britain (as well as less esoteric topics), likes to take photographs of things and stuff, and thinks that dancing is really fun.