Winning isn't everything -

Rating: 8/10 (3 March 2007)

Amongst other things Little Miss Sunshine is a delicious satire on the Western (and especially American) cultural obsession with winning at all costs. The American dream says that you can be born in a log cabin with nothing and through your efforts become rich and famous  especially famous. The culture of celebrity and success is so powerful that it has created a complex tiered hierarchy of achievement and at every level there is competition. There have to be winners and losers. So at the beginning of the movie we have Richard's banal and cringe-making seminar on the "Nine steps to winning" and we learn that for him the world is divided between winners and losers. Ghastly though this over-simplistic and shallow pitch is, those of us who have worked in the business world know that it isn't very far removed from the reality of much management training. There is always another snake oil salesman around the corner! A quick Google search finds "Nine steps to building a winning sales organisation", "Nine steps to better Telecoms service", "Nine steps to managing change" and many more such magic solution guides! The trouble with Richard's programme is not that it is vacuous, but that he can't sell it  the book deal is elusive and he is on the point of bankruptcy. The teacher on "winning" is about to become a loser.
I have always thought that one of the reasons that soccer has never really taken off in the United Sates (unlike the rest of the world) is that soccer games can end in a draw (a tie) and that unless an artificial tie-breaker is introduced there does not have to be a winner in a soccer match. In all American sports winning is everything  as American Football Coach Vince Lombardi said "If winning isn't everything why do they keep the score?" Well if you keep the score for the Hoover family then they don't come out too well. Richard is a business failure, Sheryl a divorcée, Dwayne hasn't spoken for nine months and is lost in Nietzsche, Grandpa is a foul-mouthed drug user, Frank a failed suicide  only seven-year-old Olive is an achiever. Victorious in the New Mexico "Little Miss Sunshine" contest she now wants to go to the national final in California and the family decide to go together in their clapped out camper van. The events that take place on the road eventually bond this dysfunctional group of no hopers into a team  they work together at first because they have to, and then because they want to.
When we eventually get to California and the full horror of the talent contest begins to be seen we view that horror through the eyes of the family. For the contestants' parents, the audience and (above all) the organisers they see is nothing wrong in dressing up little girls in adult clothes so that they all look like Barbie dolls each of who has a barely disguised, and wholly inappropriate, ersatz sexuality. That Olive is different and that, despite her family, she is a refreshingly normal child serves to show up the amoral hideousness of the "winning is all" society  especially when it is applied to young children.
The dichotomy between those like Richard who thinks that winning is everything and his father who is older and wiser is shown in their different approaches to Olive's wish to go to the contest. Richard says to her "There is no sense in entering the contest if you don't think that you are going to win" but Grandpa says "A real loser isn't someone who doesn't winit is someone so afraid of not winning they don't even try". But the true winners in the story are not the individuals but the family unit. Their individual values, priorities and behaviour may be questionable but in the end they triumph in spite of this. As co-director Valerie Faris says the film is " not about family values, but about the value of family".