A Screenplay With Too Much 'Cleaning'

by Brett Parker

Sunshine Cleaning is a clean and sterilized movie about a messy and ironic aspect of life. The premise holds promise and the film has the look of one of those quirky indie dramadies that exploits the hilarity in complex human emotions. Amy Adams and Emily Blunt, two contemporary actresses of supreme beauty and talent, headline and even old Alan Arkin shows up to add some sunny goofiness to the plot. The parts are in place for a likeable film, yet this one never really works. It has a serious lack of humor, juicy dialogue, and considerable significance.

Amy Adams stars as Rose, a single mother who works for a cleaning service in hopes to put her son Oscar (Jason Spevack) in a private school. Her sister Norah (Blunt) is a moping rebel who seems to be coasting through jobs and life aimlessly. Rose is having an affair with her high-school-quarterback-turned-cop old boyfriend, Mac (Steve Zahn). Mac suggests that Rose can make loads of money by cleaning up crime scenes. On the job, Mac notices how the crews that clean up the blood and guts after dead bodies make a pretty hefty paycheck for their efforts. Mac thinks she could easily apply her cleaning skills to such a profession and help ease her financial woes.

Rose enlists Norah to help her out in her new business enterprise, dubbed “Sunshine Cleaning,” and soon enough the sisters are mopping up blood and scraping up brain matter off of living rooms and bedroom ceilings. Despite gross and startling aspects of the job, the sisters finally find a nitch that appears to give them some stability. The sisters wrestle with the ups and downs of the business, as when Rose learns from a sweet-natured cleaning supply salesman (Clifton Collins, JR.) that their business might not be up to par with insurance regulations, or when Norah decides to track down the daughter (Mary Lynn Rajskub) of one of the dead bodies. They even pick up hints from their scheming father Joe (Alan Arkin) who is constantly thinking up money-making schemes to no grand success. The business threatens to fall apart, however, when Rose’s affair with Mac begins to fall apart and Norah makes a humongous mistake during one of the clean-ups.

I think I have the same problem with Sunshine Cleaning as I did with Juno: it uses a richly sad and bittersweet premise as a clothesline to explore routine and underwhelming emotional developments within the characters. More screen time is given to Rose’s affair and Norah’s angst then to the crime clean-up scenes. This is a huge mistake, for the crime scene aspect is the most interesting thing in the plot, providing a rich source for tragedy and comedy. Dealing with dead bodies can be a considerable source of hilarity (I’m one of those moviegoers who found Weekend at Bernie’s to be hilarious) yet there are no real laughs to be held in this entire viewing. I also feel the film is too coy about the poignant aspects of such a job. It is revealed that Rose and Norah suffered a great loss in their youth; the kind of loss that a job like “Sunshine Cleaning” would be a constant reminder of. I’m amazed that Rose and Norah can do this job so easily without this tragedy hanging so powerfully over their heads.

People are so quick to knock Hollywood clichés but no one ever talks about indie film clichés. Sunshine Cleaning has a chorus line of them. We get one-ended affairs, women wrestling with inadequacy, sunny folk songs (why are white people so afraid of R & B?), cute kids, kooky elders, and an offbeat subject matter meant to attract relentless quirkiness. Students of Juno and Little Miss Sunshine will find this material all too familiar and undercooked. Sunshine Cleaning feels so familiar that we suspect the screenwriter, Megan Holley, doesn’t really care about these characters and their situation but wants to use them to show off a typical offbeat dramedy that will attract an indie crowd. We know countless screenwriters who play off of Hollywood formulas to get work. Here’s one who’s playing off of art house ones.

Sunshine Cleaning has one of those casts that can do no wrong, so the film does hold considerable interest in its performances. Amy Adams and Emily Blunt can hold the screen like no other and labor away hard to make us care about underwritten characters. It’s not easy watching Adams in a teary-eyed scene where she has to deliver a monologue of eye-rolling self-pity, but she pulls it off. Even Blunt makes us care about a character that may be too strange for her own good (what’s up with the train thing?). They’re great as sisters, just wish they showed up in a different film. Alan Arkin could’ve easily hammed up the elderly silliness he dished out so wonderfully in Little Miss Sunshine but here he wisely keeps things more relaxed and convincing than the character probably demands. His character may be a rascally screwball, but Arkin makes him feel like a real person. The film’s best performance comes from Clifton Collins, JR., who exudes genuine warmth and kindness as the one-armed clerk who comes to care about the sisters and their business.

It’s never easy to not recommend a film with both Adams and Blunt, but Sunshine Cleaning is an unfortunately forgettable venture. It could’ve been a funny meditation on life and death, but it fails to flesh out such higher meanings, rendering it pointless. The laughs are scarce and the drama is routine. This film deals with people who wrestle with mediocrity as they try to find a strong place in the business world. The same could be said about the filmmakers and this current outing.