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There's a good movie somewhere in here, I thought, watching Sunshine Cleaning. Oh, right. It was called Little Miss Sunshine. Maybe you've heard of it; the makers of this long-shelved Sundance Film Festival entry certainly have.
Granted, to compare the two solely because of their Sol-dappled titles would be lazy. So instead let's compare them for all these other reasons: the New Mexico landscape, the clunker of a van adopted by the characters, the inclusion of a curmudgeonly Alan Arkin, the family dysfunction, the gifted but misunderstood kid. And as the marketing materials stress -- thereby inviting all such unflattering parallels in the first place -- the two Sunshines even share the same producers. In the end, the question isn't how much do the two have in common -- it's that, since they do, why is Cleaning a creative misfire?
Blame a script that, despite its early promise, goes nowhere. Blame the inability of the filmmakers to nail down a discernable, consistent tone -- or to convince us why we as audience members should care. Just don't blame its two stars whose performances and personalities nearly compensate for all the messy storytelling: adorable Amy Adams and sardonic petulant Emily Blunt.
Adams plays Rose, a maid who peaked in high school; she was a head cheerleader and envy-magnet back then -- now she cleans up the homes of old classmates. (Intense self-loathing is forever percolating beneath her sunny exterior: "I'm an idiot," she tells herself more than once.) The possibility of redemption, self-worth, renewal and a desperately needed payday arrives when Rose's boyfriend (Steve Zahn) -- a married homicide detective -- suggests she could make a killing, so to speak, mopping up crime scenes. Rose is intrigued -- so much so she enlists her sister, a sour, sulking screw-up named Norah (Blunt), to help. And while the movie was filmed well before the global financial meltdown, the timing couldn't be more prescient: murder is, after all, remarkably recession-proof.
But it's all set-up, frustratingly little pay-off. Rose and Norah, despite their time together up to their elbows in biohazard blowback, don't really bond or come to grips with their mother's death (the childhood tragedy that haunts them). Nor does their father (Arkin) emerge as less a crotchety puzzle by the closing credits. Most disappointingly, though, is how uneventful the crime scene work is. Some people will find that refreshing: real life is mostly inertia, after all. I just found it boring.
Still, the two stars nearly work wonders. Blunt is inscrutably sullen, managing to strike wounded chords both delicate and damaged. And Adams -- who elevates whatever material she's in -- conveys equal portions moxie and misery.
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Too bad the rest of the film resembles a crime-scene corpse: it just kind of lies there.
(This film is rated 14-A)