I originally didn’t want to see this movie as seemed silly. But so many people recommended it that when we needed a bit of comedy we opted to go the cinema before they take it off from the big screen. Also, it was playing in an independent movie theater (Admiral Twin Theatre) and we like to support that. And it was in a part of town we have never been to. It was an adventure to get there (I kept going on and off from a bridge I should have stayed on) and an even bigger one to get home: I had to stop and check the map twice in the middle of industrial nowhereland. As we got there early we had a chance to pop in for a tasty bagel at Zatz. This not being a workday it was OK for me to have a garlic bagel.
Back to the movie. I was a bit cautious in advance, because I read on IMDB that the directing couple did almost exclusively music videos in the past. But they pulled it off here (Spoiler alert) The characters of a dysfunctional family are all fine and painful caricatures. The gay, suicidal Proust scholar uncle, the color-blind, pilot-wannabe serious teenage sun, the unsuccessful success coach dad, the heroin-snorting loud grandpa, the mom, who tries to keep it altogether. And last at not least 7year old Olive, who prepares for her beauty contest under the guidance of her loving grandfather. This quite random batch of people forms a family by the end of the movie, through the bonding experience of the unwanted roadtrip to the contest in a different US state. I don’t really need to tell more about the story, it’s worth watching.
However there is a point that will remain with me even after I forget the movie in a few months or years. The big one, what I believe was the reason the movie was made, is how disgusting and hypocritical these beauty pageants for little girls are. It was gravely stomach wrenching to watch these girls to be dressed up by their evil parents as miniaturized and sexualized adults of the shallowest kind. On paintings from the Middle Age children and angels all looked like little adults, but at the time the painters didn’t know how to represent children. (Not to mention that the idea of adolescent as a separate concept was born much later.) Today, however we know better, we know that children are not small adults. These parents chose to ignore this knowledge and force their children to look like some idealized people of a non-existent glittery world. This whole subculture, haunted by JonBenet Ramsey, seems sick to me,. Olive’s innocent performance moved it over the top and exploded the scene, showing that misguided sexuality was a core element of this world.