We live in an age of winner-manic and loser-phobia. That is what distinguishes this film: LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE. Instead of being one more orchestrated anthem dedicated to the winning group, this film is a carnival about living, fighting and forgeting of the losing team.
Basically, here we have no winners: a kinky drug-abusing hippie(the grandpa), a pretentious jumpy speaker(the father), a smoking desperate housewife(the mother), a listless out-of-love gay scholar(the uncle) , an ambitious silent brother and finally Olive, a plain-looking pre-mature seven-year-old girl.
It'll be boring to keep nagging about losing and how to lose. LMS spotlights human beings' reactions to a set of chaos. At moments of disillusions, this dysfunctional family choose to move on and forget about the pains and the past. These sorry but laughing-to-tears moments are Uncle's failing suicide, Brother's vow to silence, Father's boastful fallacy about almost anything, the microbus' interval breakdown, Uncle's embarrassment of running into his ex, the bankruptcy of Father's biz plan, Grandpa's sudden death, again , Brother's discovering himself as color blind and finally, Olive's outrageous performance as a finale...Such are days of our lives, to name just a few.
As the audience, you laugh with them, and shed tears with them because you see your own lives in this film. People are so apt to be unhappy. Even if you've already been a millionare, just imagine one day you get a little problem, you will be troubled and annoyed. That is, even if you have 1,001 reasons to be happy, yet with only one tiny little nuisance, you will be sad or pessimistic. That is human nature.
LMS teaches us how to deal with our failure and to move on. There could be one day when the one you love would walk away because of somebody else, when your well-designed strategy failed to attract investors or clients, when the elaborately-prepared dinner pissed off the senior, when your dearest family left without saying goodbye, when there were only a slim chance for your dream of a lifetime, when everybody laughed at your art deco. We have to keep punching. Grandpa encourages Olive by saying "A real loser is someone who's so afraid of not winning he doesn't even try. "We lose with dignity and pride, most important of all, losers with dreams and action are not real losers.
Beauty Pageant, Singing Competition---Miss Blah blah blah, Universal Idol, Supergirls or Superboys, we just live out of the main stream benchmark. We don't deliberately say no to the monotonous unanimous standard. We just despise the regular cheap smile and uniformed kidult dress and gestures. Don't be bothered by others' label on you: cynic, superfreak or weirdo --- "Do what you love and fuck the rest."(still remember: "Fuck the regulations!" - From The legend of 1900)
Martin Luther King shouted "... ...I have a dream today." I am shouting in the same way that everybody has a dream. Suede sings'Everything Will Flow'. Well, everything will flow , except our dreams.
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