Light in Darkness

 Little Miss Sunshine

The film, Little Miss Sunshine, is the story of the Hoover family, the most imperfect and dysfunctional family you could possibly imagine. The daughter, Olive, signs up for a beauty pageant in California, and the family embarks on a road trip in their close-quartered van. The constant tension between the family in the van exposes the numerous problems each family has and faces. The dad thinks his wife’s brother is a “loser” and on multiple occasions in the beginning of the film shows a clear dislike towards him. The wife is constantly stressed because she has to worry about her aging and problematic drug using dad living with them. The son is dedicating his life to the air force and vowed to not speak until he joined, which definitely adds to the mother's stress. And the daughter, Olive, the nerd of the family, is blind to the problems going on in the family, but ultimately lives an optimistic life, which holds the family together. 

The writer of the movie, Michael Arndt, who has written countless hits including Star Wars and Toy Story, asserts that Olive is ultimately holding the structure of the family together, even through all of their hardships and differences. At the end of the movie, the family understood how much the pageant meant to her. After the judge tried to remove Olive from the show, the father quickly got onto the stage along with the rest of the family and joined Olive in her performance. Arndt additionally shows this by gradually showing the family getting along throughout the duration of the road trip. One such event that brought them together was the death of Olive’s grandpa. To honor him, they continued the road trip to California because it was what he wanted for his granddaughter. 

Arndt shows that despite the difficulties each family member faced, they were all able to overcome and find the good things in their lives. With an appeal to pathos, the ending of the movie was made to invoke a sense of happiness.