Sunshine Cleaning has all the signs of a movie that went into production too soon, with script that was either still being written or with one in serious need of revision. The movie has the cast it needs and a setting that works, but lacks the crucial element of focus.
As you’ve seen from the trailer, the movie is a light comedy about a two sisters who open up their own business cleaning up after bloody suicides or murders. This is certainly an interesting idea for a movie, but the picture never bothers to consider most of the implications of this. Instead it spends much of its time on a great many subplots, some of which are set up and never pay off.
The two sisters are Rose (Amy Adams) and Norah (Emily Blundt). Rose works as a maid and has a young son named Oscar (Jason Spevack) and spends a great deal of time looking forward to her weekly rendezvous with a married police officer (Steve Zahn). Norah lives with her father Joe (Alan Arkin), an unsuccessful businessesman who is trying to market a new kind of candy. Oscar gets kicked out of school due to some troubling behavior (that the movie never resolves, nor mentions again) so Rose feels the needs to make more money to get him into a private school. The cop advises that she can big bucks cleaning up after dead people, and she convinces Norah join her.
Among the nine million other subplots in the movie are Rose’s attempt to impress her former high school classmates at a baby shower, Norah’s quasi-voyeuristic interest in the daughter of one of the suicides (Mary Lynn Raskub) , Rose’s relationship with the cop, Rose’s potential relationship with the owner of a cleaning supplies shop (Eric Christian Olsen), the sister’s coming to terms with the death of their own mother, and Joe’s potential inability to deliver on a promise to Oscar.
Lost in all of this is any kind of analysis as to the implications of the cleaning company, the ostensible selling point of the movie. At no point does director Christine Jeffs or screenwriter Megan Holley deal with any of the obvious questions. Aside from the fact that the job would be disgusting, how would this effect a person psychologically? Would this change someone’s opinion about death, or life or religion or whatever? Is there much of a distance between cleaning up blood and tomato sauce if you clean up one enough after a while?
The screenplay is the central problem here, although the direction by Jeffs in uninspired. Some plot points, such as Oscar’s trouble at school are introduced and never referred to again, while others, such as the death of the sister’s mother, are brought up too late and pay off too quickly. The entire chronology of the movie seems off, with events that should be days apart apparently (and implausible) taking months to occur, while others seem to come along too fast.
Where the film works is in the acting, which is very impressive. I really got the impression that Adams and Blundt were members of the same family, something that rarely happens in movies. They share a sisterly bond that is utterly believable and silently real, more real that anything else in the picture.
I can’t flaw Sunshine Cleaning for a lack of ideas, or even a lack of good ones, but I can find fault in its inability to focus itself. The whole is far less than the sum of its parts, though I have to say that the movie was not boring. I think I might want to see a movie about a single mother with a troubled child, or a thirty something dealing with the emptiness of her life, or two sisters who start a weird business together, or two sisters dealing with death of their mother. But not all at once.
Sunshine Cleaning(2009)