Film review: Sunshine Cleaning

Published on Friday 19 June 2009 16:56

SUNSHINE CLEANING (15) Director: Christine Jeffs Running time: 102 minutes * * *

THE indie comedy Sunshine Cleaning opens with the very public suicide of a smartly suited businessman. In a folksy gun shop he examines a rifle, quickly inserts the bullet he's brought along, then takes his head off. It soon becomes apparent that this film isn't interested in any of the problems this guy had, just the CSI-style problem he has left behind. The police arrive and have to pick their way over Jackson Pollock splatters. An assistant wearily notes: "Hey, Carl, he's over here in Fishing, too."

In the same city, Rose (Amy Adams) is looking down the barrel of her own life, and concludes that she peaked at school where she was a head cheerleader and dated the school hero. Now she cleans the homes of old classmates, takes care of her son, Oscar (Jason Spevack), and sleeps with ex-boyfriend, Mac (Steve Zahn), who married someone else. However it's Mac, a detective, who tells Rose that crime scene cleaners make a killing mopping up blood and body parts. Rose is intrigued, and enlists help from her sister Norah (Emily Blunt), a sardonic goth who paints her disaffection with creased black racoon eyeliner.

Even though the film was shot before the global crunch, the girls' growing business as grim sweepers still makes sense. Homicide, unlike her original ambition of selling houses, is recession proof, and they pick up guidance from their cleaning products supplier, Winston (Clifton Collins Jr), who explains why health and safety won't let them tip a bloodsoaked mattress into a skip. Even so, they struggle at first with nauseating blood, gore and fluids.

The upshot is that they realise they are good at cleaning up other people's tragedies, and if that doesn't sound particularly deep or inspiring, that's Sunshine Cleaning for you, a film that seems to have bought in its plot and characters from a big shop stocking tried and trusted film tropes. There's Alan Arkin as a rascally grandpaw, a son who is seen as a troubled but is simply sensitive and smart, plus an unresolved family issue; the premature death of the sister's mother and Arkin's wife. On the other hand what seems to be a burgeoning romance between Rose and Winston is allowed to drift, unaddressed, as if director Christine Jeffs feels that in her Kerplunk of a film, where the clichs pile up like marbles, consummating a relationship with a one-armed shopkeeper might be the element that causes the film to fall apart, when in fact, it's the scene where Rose's son tries to talk to his dead grandmother on a CB radio that is probably the diciest stick in the jar.

That's not to say that Sunshine Cleaning isn't engaging or well acted, but for a film that tries to tell us that life's a mess, there are rather too many polished contrivances and quirks, not to mention the rather disappointing idea that the route to female empowerment is cleaning.

On general release from Friday