Review: ‘Sunshine Cleaning’

Red-hot actress Amy Adams may have that smile that lights up a room, but her inherent likability can only carry her so far if she’s working with a mediocre script, as proven by the misfire comedy SUNSHINE CLEANING. Emily Blunt and Alan Arkin also star in this disappointing new film about life, death, and removing blood stains.

Adams plays Rose Lorkowski, a single mom who’s having a dead-end affair with her married high school sweetheart/local cop Mac (Steve Zahn) and making ends meet by working as a maid in the upper class Albuquerque homes of her more successful high school classmates. Meanwhile tattooed younger sister Norah (Blunt) is an aimless unemployed slacker who parties hard and lives with their dad Joe (Arkin), a foul-mouthed grouch obsessed with get-rich-quick schemes. Mac mentions that crime-scene clean-up can be lucrative, if repulsive work, so Rose and Norah team up to form the Sunshine Cleaning Company of the title and spend the balance of the film scrubbing up blood and other human fluids resulting from murders and suicides (a curious career choice as the sisters are haunted by the suicide of their mother as children). Unlike CURDLED (1996) or CLEANER (2007), two other films about this specialized profession, no murder mystery unfolds nor, unfortunately, does much of a plot. Once the basic premise is established, SUNSHINE CLEANING becomes the precious and meandering portrait of the quirky Lorkowski clan. Rose may have self-esteem issues but she’s a hard worker, determined to capitalize on the opportunity and get exclusive contracts with insurance companies, her goal being to get her misbehaving son into private school. The squeamish Norah is grossed-out by her new profession and her disgust leads to a couple of funny slapstick moments. Norah is the more vulnerable and complex of the two sisters and Blunt does excellent, subtle work here. There’s a moving scene where she tries to connect to a mother she never knew by caressing some old cigarette butts stained with her lipstick. In the film’s most interesting plot thread, Norah stealthily befriends a suicide victim’s lesbian daughter (nicely played by Mary Lynn Rajskub), which stirs up some latent sexual feelings of her own. Unfortunately, this subplot ends rather abruptly as does another featuring Clifton Collins as a one-armed cleaning products salesman with a good attitude and a crush on Rose.

The two leads work off of each other well and do their best to rise above the material, but Christine Jeffs directs in an unremarkable sitcom style and Megan Holley’s screenplay should have had a lot more laugh lines assuming it was conceived as the comedy that it’s being marketed as. Alan Arkin is fine, but he’s playing the exact same curmudgeon he won his Oscar for in LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE. The difference here is that the dialogue he’s given is simply not as funny and his gruff repartee with his grandson seems especially like a desperate attempt to recreate the earlier film’s charms.

At 100 minutes, SUNSHINE CLEANING breezes by pleasantly enough and it’s never dull, but considering the subject matter, I was hoping for something maybe darker, edgier, or at least funnier. SUNSHINE CLEANING is not a bad movie just, considering the cast and subject matter, a surprisingly unsatisfying one that does not stay with the viewer for long.

‘Sunshine Cleaning’ [R] opens today in Saint Louis and is playing at the Plaza Frontenac Theatre.

[Overall: 2 stars out of 5]