Movie: Little Miss Sunshine

I recently saw "Little Miss Sunshine" with some members of my writing group. This is the kind of movie it's good to see with your writing group, because people who write fiction (at least the ones I know) understand what it's like to be different. And that is basically the theme of this movie: We're different, we're here, get used to it.

Which is a fine theme for a movie, I guess. It was very funny in places, and had one of those heartwarming family-bonding endings, but I came out of it feeling that something was missing. It wasn't until later that I could put my finger on what bothered me.

The ending was one of those self-affirming, spit-in-the-face-of-convention, movie clichés. One where a group of people gets together and decides that they will go live in their own consensus reality where beauty pageants don't exist. Hollywood (and even pseudo-indie Hollywood) has two solutions for characters who struggle with lack of acceptance by their peer groups: 1) the "cool kids" somehow come around to appreciating the "weird kid" for who he is and make him their mascot; 2)the "weird kid" decides he doesn't need the acceptance of the "cool kids" and goes off to live happily ever after in his world of denial. I guess there is the 3rd option: "Carrie".

What's wrong with this picture? It's just too Hollywood. The chances of being adopted by the "cool kids" is slim-to-none. Denial is an option, but then there is so much on a daily basis to break through your cocoon, because the world is largely run by those same people who made your life miserable in high school (e.g. George Bush and George Allen). Honestly--if your PTO meetings looked like the cast of a John Waters movie, you'd have a shot at believing it was ok to be different. But how many of us have that luxury? You bump into the tyranny of the beauty pageant everywhere you turn. The teenaged male character in "Little Miss Sunshine" had one moment of insight in a conversation with his uncle when he declared that the whole world was a beauty pageant. For me, that was the climax of the whole film. After that, it just got silly.

This film was entertaining and funny, but it took a very commercial sidestep at the end. After I had some time to think about it, I was disappointed.