A decade later, Little Miss Sunshine is the perfect film for an election year

Hollinger begins his video essay with some stand-up comedy from Jerry Seinfeld, who talks about the shame and disgrace of winning a silver medal. “You’re the number one loser,” he declares. Cut to real estate mogul Donald Trump, who boasts, “We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning.” So is the world really the way Seinfeld and Trump see it, a place where there are only two kinds of people, a small handful of winners and a multitude of losers? Little Miss Sunshine doesn’t think so.

The film revolves around young Olive Hoover (Abigail Breslin), a girl who travels with her family to compete in a child beauty pageant and who longs to emulate the perfect-seeming women she sees on television. Traveling with her are the deeply flawed and troubled members of her family, including her suicidal uncle Frank (Steve Carell) and her drug-taking grandfather Edwin (Alan Arkin). Olive’s father, Richard (Greg Kinnear), is a would-be self-help guru whose rhetoric about winning and losing is really not that far from what Trump has been saying on the campaign trail this year. Only Richard can’t seem to find an audience for his message.

None of the characters in Little Miss Sunshine would qualify as winners by most people’s objective standards, and they are not rewarded with any kind of conventional success at the end of the film. If they had been, Hollinger argues, they would have learned nothing from their experiences. What matters is that they become more accepting of themselves and of each other. In a cutthroat year like 2016, that’s an important message to keep in mind.