Sunshine Cleaning (2008)

September 04, 2009

DVD, Seattle, WA

* ½ / ****

File:Sunshine cleaning.jpg

By Scott Muoio

If aliens arrived on earth and the first thing they saw was the movie, Sunshine Cleaning they would believe all women are self-loathing, perpetual criers. That’s a shitty statement for a movie to make and Sunshine Cleaning should be ashamed of itself for painting women with such detrimentally broad and unfair strokes. But alas, that is the sad reality of a film that fumbles for a consistent tone and message even more than its characters.

The plot involves sisters Rose and Norah (Amy Adams and Emily Blount) struggling to make something out of their continuously tortured lives. The reason for their perpetual grief: the suicide death of their mother when they were little girls.

Rose is “the pretty, sweet one,” formerly her high school’s head cheerleader but now a young thirty-something embarrassed that she cleans houses for a living. She has a ten-year old son, Oscar (Jason Spevack) and still gets it on with her former high school boyfriend (Steve Zahn), who just happens to have a couple kids and is married to another high school classmate. Woe is thee.

Norah is the “rebellious, alternative one,” stomping around in tight jeans, tattoos, and an “I’ll live at home with my elderly Dad for however long he’ll let me” attitude. She’s a lost soul that seems to have no capacity to get on with her life after her Mom’s death.

Both women are “trying to find themselves” but have no idea how to do so. They’re also dumb as bricks, not because of their life decisions but because the script makes them do absurd things. I won’t reveal the ins and outs of how they progress from depressed Albuquerque-ites to owning their own blood borne pathogen cleaning business, but suffice it to write most things that can go wrong do go wrong and their paths are littered with unresolved tangents that feel more like script-writer tricks than natural flowing plot arcs. There are moments of realism, mostly the result of excellent acting from Amy Adams and unheralded Clifton Collins, Jr. as a one-armed cleaning equipment salesman, but for the most part the dopey actions of the film’s characters don’t gel with the real world.

Indeed, most of the faults in Sunshine Cleaning aren’t the result of the actors; all do a fine job. The problem is a script that struggles with an insistence to find a happy tone while piling on the catastrophe, pushes its characters on meaningless tangents, and uses inconsistent and unrealistic resolutions for its series of laborious plot points. As I’ve written of other movies, with Sunshine Cleaning you can actually hear the script’s gears turning, and that’s rarely a good thing.

Overall, this is a film that made me angry because it made fools of its characters in favor of heaping on the “woe is me” scenarios. With an excellent cast and interesting premise, a pair of women starting their own unorthodox business, there was huge potential for a great film. Unfortunately, Sunshine Cleaning gets bogged down with melancholy and overwrites itself into a miserable hole. Is there a way to dig out? Certainly, but Sunshine Cleaning never finds it.

Director: Christine Jeffs

Producer: Jeb Brody, Peter Saraf, Marc Turtletaub, Glenn Williamson

Writer: Megan Holley

Starring: Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Clifton Collins, Jr., Mary Lynn Rajskub,

Steve Zahn, Alan Arkin

Original Music: Susan Jacobs, Michael Penn

Cinematographer: John Toon

Editor: Heather Persons