Film Review of “Little Miss Sunshine”

All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way [Tolstoy, 1877].

“Tolstoy, meet the ‘Hoovers’”—as eccentrically an unhappy of a family as you will ever encounter. Over the course of 2 days (104 min in celluloid time), the Hoovers take form across a road trip that transforms each of them individually and as a three-generational family unit. Does this sound too good to be true? Well, if we are to extend this fiction into the dynamics of real familial possibility, then, yes. It is likely that their individual solipsistic personalities will still get them in trouble—each in his or her own idiosyncratic way. No doubt soon enough each character will return to “chafing” one another, yet there is also something powerfully portrayed in their sojourn that leaves one with lingering hope and perhaps even faith; that none of the Hoover family members—if flesh rather than celluoid—would ever be quite the same. On this premise, I assert that substantial character (logical) change is truly possible.

Among the many compelling ideas descriptive of highly dysfunctional families, patterns of connection and disconnection referred to as centripetal

versus centrifugal underscore the systematic cleaving of its members (Beavers and Voeller, 1983). Families exhibiting the centripetal pattern draw tightly together. Their degree of dysfunction is measured by their becoming more and more enmeshed. The world outside the family is perceived as frightening and threatening; and, as a result, there is a requirement for all to engage in “twinship” and “merger.” This submersion makes the articulation of selfhood and subjective difference its own form of threat in which separation and individuation are squelched. System-wide symptoms arise when “the call” of the “external” world turns a member's eyes outward instead of back to the meaning enforcing structure—the authority of the family. To defy this posture is tantamount to exposing the family as a whole to the caustic “out