Sunshine Cleaning

I liked this film a lot, although I recognize its limitations. Never as funny as the oddball premise would lead you to expect, it also seems to pull up a bit short as a drama about two sisters trying to heal their damaged lives and relationship. In a way, it kind of suffers from an identity crisis, but since I do, too, I'm willing to forgive it. Amy Adams and Emily Blunt are terrific as the sisters, and that simply may be enough for a strong recommendation. Ditto Alan Arkin, one of my favorite actors. No, it's not Little Miss Sunshine Redux, although it's certainly guilty of swiping a bit of that film's mojo. It stands on its own, however, and I actually like it better. Heresy, I know. It won't be the last time I'm guilty of it.


SUNSHINE CLEANING

What I like most about Sunshine Cleaning is that it’s the kind of story that isn’t immediately obvious. There’s no direct, predictable path from the beginning to the end, and the characters never do quite what you expect them to do. But neither are there any truly big surprises along the way. Outfitted with a genial group of eccentrics and an offbeat premise, Sunshine settles for a sweet, mildly unconventional outcome, rather than pushing the audience toward anything too dark or disturbing. The film could have taken some risks, but instead stays safely within the boundaries of its rather modest goals. This is not entirely a bad thing. But I couldn’t help feeling a slight bit of disappointment at the end, as with a promise left partially unfulfilled.

Unfulfilled promise is the theme with which the story opens. Two sisters, Rose (Amy Adams) and Norah (Emily Blunt), lead lives of quiet desperation in their home town of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rose, the eldest, toils for a maid service and does her best as a single mom to raise her son, Oscar. The mostly out-of-work Norah still lives at home and seems to care for little besides babysitting Oscar, whom she entertains with hilariously awful bedtime stories about serial killers. It’s through Oscar that these two moribund lives are given a chance at revival. A precocious, sweet-tempered boy suffering from ADD, he is expelled from school for constantly disrupting his classroom. In order to send him to a private school where he will receive the special attention he needs, Rose looks around for ways to make more money. She decides to try her hand at cleaning up crime scenes, especially those of murders and suicides, a lucrative field because of the high cost of wiping away blood and other biohazards. With the reluctant Norah in tow, Rose creates “Sunshine Cleaning” and embarks on a seriocomic journey into the messy aftermath of violent death.

A quirky set-up and down-on-their-luck characters generally mean that a movie is going to spend its quality time exploring relationships and character, rather than building plot. Sunshine Cleaning treats these expectations as earnestly as a moral duty. Episodic and deliberate, the film unveils its plan slowly and cautiously, like sunlight advancing across a room. The focus of the story is the relationship between the two sisters, whose lives prior to their business partnership present a study in contrasts, as well as unresolved tensions. Rose, a former high school golden girl--head cheerleader, dated the quarterback--gamely tries to project a positive attitude despite confronting the specter of failure and unfulfilled potential behind every thankless task of her daily life. Self-administered pep talks (“You are strong, you are a winner”) temporarily prop up her hopes for a better future, but her heart isn’t in it when called upon to make a real effort at self-improvement. Instead, she treads water by sleeping with her ex-quarterback boyfriend (Steve Zahn), now married and a cop. Norah, sullen and rebellious, pursues a Loser lifestyle of oversleeping, wearing too much black eyeliner, and getting fired from crappy jobs she never wanted in the first place. “Pursues” might be putting it too aggressively—it’s more like she sits still and waits for failure to catch up with her. But she seems to welcome it when it arrives. Surprisingly sensitive for her tough chick look, Norah is more hurt than angry—her rebellion is half-hearted, literally a mask of make-up behind which crouches a sad, irresolute child.

Rose’s and Norah’s dead-end lives conflict in many ways yet are so closely intertwined they make no sense without each other. The reason is revealed through uneasy flashbacks as the film unfolds: their low self-esteem and lack of ambition are rooted in their mother’s mysterious suicide when they were children (a trauma made worse by their discovery of her body). Although raised by their loving father, a well-meaning but hapless salesman (the always wonderful Alan Arkin), they are stuck on hold, their futures blocked by the confusion and pain of this event. As is their relationship: it’s the different paths this tragedy has sent them down that form the basis of the ongoing, silent quarrel between them. Neither is happy with the other’s choices, or weaknesses, or mistakes.

The main business of the story, then, is to help each woman find her way back to a sense of purpose in her life, and to each other. Adams and Blunt make this business worth investing in: each inhabits her half of the damaged pair with the right proportions of whimsy and soulfulness. Adams, an actress whose nervous intensity sometimes proves distracting, tempers it here with low-key humor and a rueful self-awareness. As a result, she offers a touching portrait of a once-shallow woman, uncomfortable with introspection, who learns to believe in her own resolve. But it’s Blunt who gives the film its edge. While Adams blossoms as Rose, Blunt’s Norah sinks further into the depths of her despair, until she touches bottom. Norah perpetrates the film’s two worst events--deeply hurting a friend and causing a near fatal crisis for the burgeoning business, which almost severs her relationship with Rose completely. Blunt avoids all the possible clichés in portraying this damned soul: Norah has a genius for self-destruction and a taste for self-pity, but Blunt makes her warm, empathetic, and engaging throughout, without ever compromising the volatility or unpredictability that make Norah dangerous. It’s a performance of great skill and subtlety from an actress who needs more exposure.

Sunshine is not completely dark, however. Arkin delivers another comic gem in his turn as the family patriarch, strongly reminiscent of his Oscar-winning role in Little Miss Sunshine (2006). This film has been accused of over-emulating the earlier one, and writer Megan Holley and director Christine Jeffs may indeed have had their eyes on the prize of that unexpected hit--Arkin is once again paired with a winning child actor (Jason Spevack), and a family of mismatched members once more learns to pull together in a crisis--but if it starts out copying the formula for the first Sunshine, it ends by mixing the elements very differently. The current film is not the ensemble piece the earlier one was, since it’s basically a sister act, and its humor is far less raucous, much more attuned to the troubling undercurrents of lives haunted by loss and wounded love.

What Holley and Jeffs have actually created in Sunshine Cleaning is an elaborate metaphor for healing: cleaning up other people’s messes, the bloody remains of others’ broken lives, is the surest way for Rose and Norah to put themselves right at last, and restore the emotional order that finding their mother’s blood-soaked body blasted apart. By running her own business, Rose discovers a mature sense of self-worth that is far more satisfying than what the extrovert life of a high school celebrity provided her. Norah’s fate is more open-ended. She finally leaves home at the film’s conclusion and takes to the road, searching for an identity beyond the limits of the grief that for years has defined her.

Sunshine’s final revelation comes quietly but inevitably, the result, I believe, of Jeffs’ leisurely pacing and understated direction: these two women--whose disappointing, interrupted lives were not the causes of their unhappiness but symptoms of it--are two halves of one person, finally completed and made whole in the film’s climactic scene, a beautifully played moment of reconciliation between Adams and Blunt. If Sunshine Cleaning isn’t the inspired or beguiling film it could have been, neither is it a film which fails to warm and illuminate in many small but important ways.