Sunshine Cleaning

Sunshine Cleaning

102 Minutes

Here’s a fun movie trivia question: What comes between Holocaust Movie Season and Summer Blockbuster Season? Living on the Lower End of the Food Chain Movie Season. Thank you, Slumdog! Here’s another one: Other than the word “Sunshine” in the title, what do Sunshine Cleaning and Little Miss Sunshine have in common? A quirky, dysfunctional family, a bland, generic Western setting, Alan Arkin doing his blunt-talking, lovably cranky shtick and pairing off with a little kid, a journey of self-discovery, an old van and the same production company.

Like Frozen River, Sunshine is a chick flick that replaces the heartache of the manhunt with the pursuit of livelihood through unusual entrepreneurship. The film opens with a dark and promising note: A man walks into a sporting goods store and blows his brains out with a shotgun in front of a talking moose head. The aftermath of the bloody suicide is played for some black comedy but director Christine Jeffs, to the story’s demise, grows increasingly careful to strike a delicate balance between the absurdly macabre and the poignantly mournful. The forced upbeat ending to the tune of rock classic “Spirit in the Sky” can only be 99 minutes away.

Rose (Amy Adams), a former head cheerleader turned self-proclaimed loser, couldn’t get her life on track after high school. She’s a single mom who makes a living cleaning successful people’s houses and conducts an affair with her married high school sweetheart in a cheap motel. Her self-esteem is at its lowest point. After her son gets in trouble for licking his teacher’s leg, Rose becomes desperate to get him into a school where they appreciate quirky, big-eyed boys with Attention Deficit Disorder. Rose persuades Norah (Emily Blunt), her quirky, younger, slacker sister, to go into the crime scene clean-up business with her to make some quick cash. The screw-up Norah agrees since she lacks better prospects. She just got fired from her fast-food restaurant job and lives with dad (Arkin), a quirky curmudgeon with a lifelong history of goofy, ill-fated get rich quick schemes. In no time, the girls are up to their elbows in bodily fluids and success and self-respect is only a few brain splatters away. That is, until Norah screws up everything and the journey of self-discovery gets in the way. Eventually, the sisters work through the trauma caused by the DIY death of their mother and find salvation cleaning up bloody crime scenes.

The zero production value, a.k.a. “Method Producing,” of this packaged indie is definitely up on the screen, which serves the story well. The filmmakers could have shot in any state with film production incentives, but it’s hard to think of another locale with more capacity to drive its population to suicide than the very beige Albuquerque. Maybe Bakersfield.

Blunt and Adams do their best to break from their movie people molds and barely save the movie from becoming just a pile of recycled indie clichés. Adams proves yet again her irresistible screen presence and Blunt underplays both the comedy and the tragedy of the vulnerable, resentful Norah with good comic timing and a touch of pathos. A great deal of suspension of disbelief is needed to buy that these two pretty and appealing actresses are the big losers they portray.

Sunshine’s grisly premise would have been better suited for black comedy, but instead it’s toned down with tried-and-true lessons in perseverance and unconditional love. The director tries too hard to find a balance between the story’s dark currents and offbeat comedy, and the result is often uneven, with the humor diminishing as things progress. Since the premise is not exploited fully, it becomes a gimmick. Sunshine stumbles with too much drama and not enough comedy and eventually falls as a result of its obvious crowd-pleasing contrivances. What could have been a very funny black comedy is instead a tepid, serious dramedy about strained family relationships and overcoming the loss of loved ones. Cue the song.

by Teri Carson