Abigail Breslin – Bitch Flicks

Lessons from Underrated Coming of Age Flicks

Something about summer always makes me nostalgic. I think it’s that when you’re a kid, when you’re a teenager, it all seems so significant. You tend to measure time in summers, those long unstructured months that melt together in your own dream world where your parents have no authority. How many coming of age stories begin with something akin to “It was the summer I turned 16”? In honor of the summer months, I thought I’d take a look at some underrated coming of age films and what I learned from them.

Something about summer always makes me nostalgic.

Remember riding your bike around town? Remember waiting at the ice cream truck, or trying on new looks in front of the mirror, driving aimlessly around with a new license, or just listening to music in your room alone and having multiple epiphanies? ‘Tis the season to come of age. To be forever changed.

I think it’s that when you’re a kid, when you’re a teenager, it all seems so significant. You tend to measure time in summers, those long unstructured months that melt together in your own dream world where your parents have no authority. How many coming of age stories begin with something akin to “It was the summer I turned 16”?

In honor of the summer months, I thought I’d take a look at some underrated coming of age films and what I learned from them.

Slums of Beverly Hills

Like many coming of age classics, Slums of Beverly Hills is both semi-autobiographical (for writer-director Tamara Jenkins) and set in the recent past. 90s indie darling Natasha Lyonne plays Vivian Abromowitz, a girl struggling with her dysfunctional family, burgeoning sexuality and uncomfortably large breasts (an unusual teenage girl problem in a genre full of girls praying for big boobs), all while constantly moving between seedy apartments in Beverly Hills as part of her father’s plan to allow her and her brothers to attend prestigious schools. Through the course of the film, Vivian not only has her period and loses her virginity, clear markers of ascent into womanhood, but also realizes sex can be pleasurable and she has a right to demand that it is. She also comes to appreciate her eccentric father (Alan Arkin) for the sacrifices he makes to give his children the best futures possible.

Lesson: Learn to be amused, not afflicted. Practice saying, one day this will all go in my memoir.

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael, like Heathers, Beetlejuice, and Mermaids, stars Winona Ryder back when she was the patron saint of “weird girls” who liked to wear black and didn’t talk much in class. Her unfortunately named character, Dinky, is a social outcast who prefers animals to her peers, who constantly taunt and torture her and disappoints her adoptive mother by rejecting feminine clothing. Though sometimes its hard to figure out whether Dinky is ostracized for being antisocial or has learned to be antisocial after years of being ostracized. Stuck in a quirky indie film style town where the childhood home of minor celebrity, Roxy Carmichael, is preserved as a museum, Dinky sets out to validate her existence by proving she is Roxy’s long lost daughter.

Lesson: You can’t develop in a vacuum. Spending time alone is valuable, but you really learn who you are from living in the world you have and getting to know the people around you, not from escaping into the world you wish you had.

Lisa’s whole understanding of the world is changed when she watches a woman die in her arms and knows she is partially responsible.

Margaret

Despite hitting some familiar beats (loss of virginity, teacher-student relationship, first encounter with death), Margaret is a very different type of coming of age story, and to my mind, a truer one, than I’ve seen before. As it begins, Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin), a privileged Manhattan teenager, is just coming into her own. She has new and serious opinions about war and politics and passionately argues them in class and charges around the city casually flirting and testing out her new power. When she distracts a bus driver, contributing to a fatal accident, her grief and guilt lead her to seek the driver’s dismissal, which she feels is the only fair consequence. Here, Lisa shows how young she still is, as she doggedly seeks fairness, blind to the interests of the other parties involved and to any other option. She still sees the world as one where the guilty are always punished and the innocent rewarded, and in the moment where she learns things will not work the ways she imagined, she breaks down into a child-like tantrum.

Lesson: Life isn’t fair, it’s really not fair and sometimes there is nothing you can do to make things right.

Dirty Girl

Danielle Edmundson (Juno Temple) thinks God made her purely for sex. Known as the “Dirty Girl” at school for her promiscuity, Danielle looks down on the girls in her class who fuss over their appearance and wish for their Prince Charmings, and uses the boys to prove to herself she has a talent. In Clark (Jeremy Dozier), a shy, gay boy who also sticks out like a sore thumb in their 1980s Oklahoma town, she finds a kindred spirit and the two hit the road, ostensibly to find Danielle’s father, but really to find themselves. Neither Clark nor Danielle have it all figured out. At first she’s the cooler-than-thou mentor who ups his confidence, but in the last moments he’s the one who helps her figure out who she wants to be. Refreshingly, the narrative doesn’t suggest Danielle’s sexual experience is wrong or that she needs to be celibate, but that it’s not the only thing she has or only way people should define her.

Lesson: The people you want in your life are the people who like you for who you are–the people that encourage you to be yourself, but only the best version of yourself.

Danielle appraises her peers and dislikes what she sees.

Haunter

Most teenagers feel bored and trapped at some point, in their small towns or in their families. Haunter twists teenage alienation into a ghost story centered around Lisa Johnson (Abigail Breslin), another 80s teen, the only person in her family who realizes they’re dead. I chose to read Haunter as coming of age story, despite the fact that the central character will never get any older because it’s all about what Lisa learns. She becomes responsible for her family as the only one that knows the truth and her world becomes a nightmare none of them are aware of, as she is tormented by an murderous spirit. Unlike most alienated teenage girls she also finds herself through taking on the mission of trying to save the family currently living in the house from being the murderer’s next victims. And Lisa also grows in the expected ways for a coming of age heroine, as she goes from blaming her parents for their weaknesses and feeling superior, to allowing herself to understand, and walk in their shoes.

Lesson: Some of your angsty feelings are legitimate, some are self-indulgent. It’s a great skill to know the difference.

Lisa’s clarinet practice fills her time as she remains stuck in her house, the same day repeating endlessly.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

When Girlhood Fantasy Turns Murderous: ‘Perfect Sisters’

It’s no easy feat to make a true crime film that rises above Lifetime schlock. It takes things like dark humor, broader social context, impressive cinematography and storytelling risks to breathe life into a stale murder plot. With that goal, ‘Perfect Sisters’ isn’t exactly a blazing success, often falling into the trap of domestic melodrama, but I think it’s still worth a watch.
Based on a notorious Canadian case where teenage sisters drowned their mother in a bathtub, it’s the story of Sandra (Abigail Breslin) and Beth (Georgie Henley), sisters whose whole world is each other.

Sandra and Beth rely on each other for comfort and reassurance

Based on a notorious Canadian case , where teenage sisters drowned their mother in a bathtub, it’s the story of Sandra (Abigail Breslin) and Beth (Georgie Henley), sisters whose whole world is each other. These girls have faced a difficult childhood, forced to take care of their younger brother and Linda (Mira Sorvino), their depressed alcoholic mother; they see each other as their one constant. As Sandra says, “It was always me and my sister against the big bad world.”

Until the murder begins to unravel them, the sisters have an appealing symbiosis. They share a made-up language, shared fantasies and Beth knows to corroborate Sandra’s lies unprompted. For their shared point of view on the events, the girls make one singular person, constantly clinging to each other. Sandra also acts as Beth’s mother, holding her when she’s scared at night and fighting off Linda’s boyfriend Bowman (James Russo) when he attempts to attack her. Though they both have love interests, their primary bond is with each other.

Used to moving around when Linda loses jobs and to cramped apartments with roaches, they’ve learned to make the best of it with their rituals of setting up their shared bedroom. They’re quite skilled at interior design, arranging their possessions to mimic faded wealth and glamor, the private castle of two princesses trapped by their mother’s demons.

The girls make the best of their situation by decorating their room, making it into a refuge

The film is reminiscent of Heavenly Creatures–two girls who share a secret world that no one else can understand. As in that movie, also the true story of a murder committed by teenage girls, their fantasies bleed into reality as their lives grow bleaker, becoming more colorful and increasingly violent.

Perfect Sisters has been criticized by people familiar with the case, such as Bob Mitchell, the reporter who wrote The Class Project , the true crime book it’s based on, for playing down greed as a motive, instead suggesting the girls are driven to murder by their difficult circumstances.

Director Stanley M. Brooks has said his aim in the film was to show the sisters as sympathetic characters, not evil or sociopathic, but immature young women who make made bad decisions. He attempted to be accurate to the real events and says he fictionalized almost nothing about the case. Whatever the truth is, this approach is more cinematic, giving viewers likable (to a point) characters and room for discussion over their level of awareness of their actions and the nature of evil.

As in most true crime movies, viewers know going in both that the girls’ mother will be murdered and that they are guilty. The murder is not a shocking climax that has viewers on the edge of their seats and there is no real mystery or suspense, as the these’s never any doubt of the perpetrator. Brooks’ decision to challenge the audience to sympathize with girls we know will become killers is one that adds an intriguing element to the film, each bit of the girls’ inner lives, the minutia of teenage girlhood and idle lunchroom gossip is weighed against the knowledge of viciousness they are capable of.

Before school starts, the sisters give themselves makeovers, each attempting to be someone new and more desirable this year

It’s startling to watch the squeaky clean child stars of Little Miss Sunshine (Breslin) and The Chronicles of Narnia (Henley) move in darker, adult fare, playing the matricidal “bath-tub girls.” Automatically, the audience’s sympathies are aligned with these familiar faces we’re used to seeing as adorable children who believe in magic and fairness.

Here, they’re morbid (in one scene, Sandra is distracted from a kiss by the sight of a dead bird) and jaded. Still, they’re good girls with perfect disciplinary records and honor roll grades. Over the summer, they’ve each reinvented themselves. Beth dyes her hair matte black and wears heavy eye make-up to attract the gothic romance of her dreams, while Sandra yearns to be popular and lose her goody-goody rep. She makes up rumors about herself to get attention, strangely they are the type of things most girls would try to cover up. Sandra wants to be a bad girls, desirable and dangerous, so she tells everyone she’s pregnant by her therapist.

They’re used to their mother’s addiction and they’ve been dealing with it for a long time, propping her up, shuttling her through their routines and taking on her responsibilities. There are several hints that the girls and their brother have experienced earlier traumas because of their mother and her string of abusive boyfriends.

When Linda begins dating Bowman, a wealthy man who can support them, she puts up with beatings and cruelty, as well as his enabling of her addiction into a worse state than the girls can remember it ever being. They reach their breaking point when she does nothing to help them when Bowman hits their brother and begins to make sexual advances towards Beth.

It’s suggested that her alcoholism and refusal to leave her abusive boyfriend, even when he turns on her children, stems from low self worth. She doesn’t feel her life matters, so she allows Bowman to beat her. The girls have dealt with this situation so many times before that they are disturbingly able to write off their mother’s life. To their minds, she’s given it up already. They’d be fine to leave her to destroy herself, but as minors who depend on her, if she goes down, she takes them with her.

Together, the sisters imagine a perfect mother who will do anything to protect them

To cope, Sandra and Beth imagine their perfect mother, a vision they both interact with. Their perfect mother is impeccable groomed and shines with a halo of light and offers to make cookies and brush their hair. In their fantasies, she’s always there with to take care of them and provide comfort, something they have to find in each other instead. In reality, Linda is embarrassing. She tries to be her daughters’ friend and jokes around with their friends. At a party in their apartment, she gets drunk and babbles sexual things while their guests laugh at her.

When Sandra is called upon to be the adult of the family and attend her brother’s parent-teacher conference, she wears the same outfit as their perfect mother wears in their fantasies. Dressed in these clothes, Sandra clearly resembles Linda. She takes on her maternal responsibilities, using this perfect image of Linda as a role model and fixation on remaining in control to create as much distance as she can between her and her mother’s embarrassing weakness. Long after Beth has given up on her, Sandra continues to make excuses for Linda and try to understand her. In the wake of the murder, her prized control dissolves and Sandra repeats her mother’s self destructive mistakes, drinking and flirting and sharing her story with anyone who’ll listen. Beth becomes ashamed of her, in one scene saying, “You remind me of Mom.”

Before deciding to kill her, they attempt to find other ways to save themselves. They appeal to both their father and their wealthy aunt, asking to live with them but are denied. The girls quickly lose their faith in social services as they’re told no one can help them until there has been serious abuse. Beth speaks the truth about the cycle of trauma, “By the time they do anything, I’ll be the alcoholic neglecting my kids.” Through this frenzied attempts, Bowman’s threat of rape is treated as an inevitability. It’s a truly terrifying situation, sooner or later, they suppose, Beth will be vulnerable and alone. They have to do something before that happens.

Linda leans on her daughters, forcing them to take care of her even when they need her to take care of them

Though we see them trying to get out of their situation by finding a new place to live, the judge at their sentencing later in the film, rightly points out that there are teenagers who have been in much worse situations and not murdered anyone. After all, Sandra is a senior, soon she’d be an adult capable of living alone. This suggests that they are unwilling to do something hard, like work multiple jobs and live on minimum wage to support themselves. Their ideal situations are either to live on their own with an insurance payout or be taken in by their wealthy aunt.

Perfect Sisters is not afraid to show the cruelty of these girls. They are able to causally plot their mother’s murder, laughing about it with their friends, enthusiastically speculating about the freedom that will be available to them, chatting online and researching the pros and cons of different methods. Planning the murder takes on no more weight than speculating who’s dating who or what’ll be on the next math test. In one scene, the girls form an official “murder club” and gather in a school classroom writing ideas on the board. In another, the group gathers at the sisters’ home and practice attacking each other. It’s never entirely clear if their friends realize plotting the murder is more than just a game for the sisters.

In a darkly comic montage, the sisters crowd around a computer with their friends and watch their mother die over and over again in different scenarios. Part reality TV viewers, part judges scoring a performance, they watch and laugh as their mother is strangled and suffocated, pushed down the stairs and set on fire. In the end, they decide drowning will be quick, easy to make look like an accident, and it’d get the biggest insurance payout.

The murder itself creates a rift between them, when Beth leaves the bathroom while Sandra holds their mother’s head underwater. It also begins to reveal, for the first time, the fundamental difference between the girls, as shown by how they cope. While Sandra immediately panics and appears to regret what she’s done, Beth cries on cue as she calls 911, a smile on her face.

Sandra is crippled by her guilt, haunted by the memory of her mother face under the water

The knowledge of what they did hovers as an open secret through their high school and they reach a higher social status. Some classmates act like they are celebrities, having them pose for pictures, as the stroll down the hallway, while other gawk and retreat, afraid. The murder was so well planned that it seems like they would have gotten away with it if they weren’t gossipy, boy crazy and immature- basically if they weren’t teenage girls.

The last act of Perfect Sisters forms an intriguing portrait of how differently two people react to one event. Beth grows cold and introverted, while Sandra externalizes her guilt, partying and basking in her celebrity. She becomes the sloppy mess everyone secretly laughs at at parties, confessing the murder to anyone who’ll listen. The boy next door type who has loved her for years, biding his time, finally gives up on her and disgusted by what he sees as her lack of remorse, wears a wire to secure her confession.

Of course, they’re convicted and sentenced to jail time, but that’s not the real tragedy in the sisters’ eyes. In the end, they’re literally ripped apart, kicking and screaming by security officers and forbidden from communicating with each other for the duration of their sentences. In trying to save themselves, they each lost the one person who made them feel whole. Both girls are now released and attending college, and due to Canadian law regarding young offenders, their identities are protected (their names were changed for the film).

The girls only realize the gravity of their actions when they are found guilty and forbidden to see each other

In the last sequence, we are shown the girls as children changing in their teenage selves, as onscreen text explains their fates. This suggests the tragedy of their transformation from innocent children into convicted killers.

_________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.

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

Movie poster for Little Miss Sunshine

This is a guest review by Melissa Richard.

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.

Sheryl checking in with Olive before her talent act, with Richard and Dwayne looking on

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.

Richard explaining to Olive why Uncle Frank may be a loser, but she’s going to be a winner, in the dinner scene

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.”

The Hoovers at their first pit stop on the road, looking totally enthused as Richard explains to Olive how cream makes you fat

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).

Frank, Richard, and Dwayne rockin’ out on stage with Olive

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.

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.