Little Miss Sunshine- Richard Hoover
This “All American� white middle class family was seemingly normal, until all of their personal battles were shoved into one broken down van for a last minute road trip to, of all things, a little girl’s beauty pageant. Their individual problems were all combined in what would seem to be a disastrous ending, but in the end the family had shared their battles with one another and came away from the situation a stronger group as a whole, with closer relationships and personal growth. Richard Hoover’s battle seemed to be his fight to be the bread winner for his family. He was obsessed with his work, and when his deal didn’t work out, his motives seemed to change. At first he only seemed concerned with his daughter not eating ice cream and getting fat, but in the end he learned that just because she did not win the pageant she was not a LOSER. At a certain point in the film I questioned his motives, and his desire to get his daughter to the pageant. Was it so that she would be a WINNER and get prize money for the pageant to help the family financially? It would certainly take a lot to lift your father’s dead body out of a hospital window and stuff him in the trunk of your car on a family road trip. I think any normal, all American family, would have ended the trip there. But something made him keep their promise to their daughter, and for him, at first, it might have been for himself rather than for his daughter. In the end I feel like he learned a lot from his experience on the road trip. For example, that Olive needed to be a kid and eat ice cream, and not be a WINNER all of the time.