Review

Review Date: 5-April-09
Spoiler Rating: Low
Juju Judgment: Juicy

Sunshine Cleaning (2009)

Sunshine Cleaning is one of those little films that might have sunk into nondescriptness in attempting to reflect real life. It is saved by the glow emanating from stars Amy Adams and Emily Blunt. As sisters coping with a lifelong string of tough luck, they appear to relish (what I assume to be) an actor's dream job: the chance to step inside an average person's skin and explicate challenges that have nothing to do with star-crossed love, high-stakes crime, alien invasion, or superheroic responsibility.

Adams plays the older sister Rose, the sole responsible member of a family consisting of her son (Jason Spevack), her father (Alan Arkin), and her sister Norah. Their mother died when they were young, which explains in large part why Rose became the responsible one, why Norah feels lost in the world, and maybe also why they find themselves starting a business to clean up places where people have died. In scrubbing away the blood of suicides and disposing of clutter that rotted with its owner's existence, Rose satisfies her yearning to overcome hardship and reach a tidier plane. Norah is along for the ride, being lousy at holding down jobs on her own.

I have yet to see a performance from Adams which is not completely disarming, and I found it easy to sympathize with Rose as she struggles to put her affairs in order. (Arkin, by contrast, does not rise above the superfluity of his role.) In addition to single motherhood and everyday concerns about money, Rose bumps up against a school principal who wants to rein in her son with drugs, a steady boyfriend who refuses to leave his wife, and a rich acquaintance from high school who heightens her sense of failure. Norah does not share her sister's modest ambitions, yet Blunt's expressive slouch and soulful gaze prove that she is looking for something. Sadly, what she finds by continuing to hang around Rose is a knack for making things worse.

Sunshine Cleaning allows its characters to win new possibilities without fully resolving their problems. The fact remains that loves bloom and fade, people die, and the living keep going both because and in spite of one another. It is a messy business, and there is something to be said for those who try to make it neater.

Copyright © 2009 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.