SUNSHINE Cleaning comes from the makers of Little Miss Sunshine, and if the prominence of the word "sunshine" in the title isn't enough to clue you into that fact, the just-quirky-enough story, the anywhere-USA setting, the lovably dysfunctional char
acters and the presence of Alan Arkin as another foul-mouthed grandpa ready to dispense no-nonsense wisdom to his kids and grandkid should do the trick.
Little more than a checklist of American indie movie clichés reassembled in such a way as to legally qualify it as a new film, this tale of two sisters who stumble into the surprisingly lucrative world of crime-scene clean-ups delivers the same kind of comfort viewing experience offered by any formulaic summer blockbuster. You already know exactly what you're going to get out of it, so the only thing that matters is how good a job its component parts do in helping you get to a reassuringly familiar place.
Luckily for Sunshine Cleaning, those component parts include Amy Adams. She plays Rose, a single mother stuck in the small town she grew up in, where she has to endure the daily humiliation that comes from earning a living cleaning the homes of former classmates, having once been the most popular girl in school. Further lowering her self-esteem is the fact she's having an affair with Mac (Steve Zahn), her high school boyfriend who is now married to another girl from school and working as a police detective.
Meanwhile, her son, Oscar (Jason Spevack), is in danger of being put in his school's special needs unit because they don't understand how unique he is. Opting to pull him out rather than let this happen, she needs money to enable her to send him to a private school, which is why, after a tip from Mac, she sets up her titular cleaning business, scrubbing down grisly crime scenes, despite not knowing the first thing about biohazard regulations.
Helping her is her screw-up sister, Norah (Emily Blunt), whose inability to hold down a regular job doesn't exactly make her an ideal business partner, something that comes increasingly to the fore as she pursues a vaguely stalker-like, possibly Sapphic, relationship with the daughter of one of the victims she and Rose have to clean-up after. Naturally, Norah's volatile temperament is in marked contrast to Rose's life of quiet desperation and, just as naturally, the film provides a huge, honking back-story involving the death of their mother to explain why they've turned out the way they have.
Such things skew the tone of the film, which is as messy as one of Rose and Norah's blood-splattered, fly-infested cleaning jobs, veering as it does from oddball comedy to moments of serious contemplation, to try-hard attempts to be cute in an idiosyncratic way. New Zealand director Christine Jeffs (Sylvia, Rain), working from a script by first-time writer Megan Holley, certainly has a sure touch with her actors but can't quite seem to make the story hang together in any satisfactory way. Plot points that look as if they're going to be important end up going nowhere; others are speciously included to bring about the third act's dramatic fireworks, which are far too easily resolved in the film's desperation to send you out feeling happy. Again, it's Adams who deserves most credit for getting you to that place. She helps you believe that Rose starts finding fulfilment in such ugly work, so much so that even when the film works against her by making her do stupid things, like attend a baby shower on the day of her biggest job, you're almost – almost – prepared to forgive it its flaws.
