A good idea can only go so far.
This is what you come to learn after seeing Sunshine Cleaning, a movie that entered last year’s Sundance Film Festival with some quietly optimistic hype but now seems destined to fall into obscurity.
A stellar cast of renowned character actors are on board to bring first-time scribe Megan Holley’s screenplay to life. It turns out, however, a collection of fine performances does not a good film make. Under the fairly bland guidance of Kiwi director Christine Jeffs (Sylvia), the film’s storyline never takes a firm grasp on its novel concept and ultimately leaves a lot to be desired.
Sunshine Cleaning features the always excellent Amy Adams (coming off her subtly moving Oscar-nominated role in Doubt) and the equally dependable Emily Blunt (Charlie Wilson’s War) as Rose and Norah Lorkowski, a pair of down-on-their-luck sisters.
Rose is the 30-something single mother who was the captain of her high school cheerleading squad and (of course) dated the quarterback, then realized things don’t come quite so easily in the real world.
Love has been hard to come by for Rose, as she finds herself sleeping with an ex-boyfriend (Steve Zahn, Strange Wilderness) in spite of the wedding band on his finger. Norah, several years Rose’s junior, is the rebellious, tattooed slacker type who just isn’t into the whole responsibility thing.
Meanwhile, Rose’s son, Oscar (Jason Spevack, The Stone Angel), is a restless little devil who gets into nothing but trouble at school. Seeing a private education as the only path for her child, Rose decides her salary as a maid isn’t going to be enough.
Looking for some quick dough, Rose finds a perfect, if unlikely, opportunity: entering the high-paying world of crime scene cleanup. Bringing Norah along for the ride, Rose starts tidying up the blood and guts still left over when police are done with the messy situations.
Adams is in particularly good form here while portraying the insecure, vulnerable tendencies that define her character. A scene where she comforts the widow (a touching Lois Geary, The Astronaut Farmer) of a suicide victim is the film’s most memorable moment.
As Sunshine Cleaning treads along, the movie starts suffering from a major lack of momentum. You keep waiting for an unpredictable twist to turn the film on its head, but instead settle for a not-so-satisfying subplot about a blossoming friendship between Norah and the daughter of one crime scene’s casualty (Mary Lynn Rajskub, 24).
Lost in this movie is the perpetual scene-stealer, Alan Arkin, who essentially plays a tamer version of his foul-mouthed, heroin-snorting grandpa from the similarly titled indie, Little Miss Sunshine. Starring as Rose’s and Norah’s brash father, Arkin spends most of the film looking after Oscar while trying to break the bank with some rather sketchy get-rich-quick schemes, and the narrative thread feels distractingly detached.
Similarly wasted is the wonderful Clifton Collins Jr. (The Horsemen), whose character’s presence is a sadly pointless element. As Winston, the one-armed hardware store clerk, he develops into a friendly face for Rose to see in some otherwise dreary situations. You wait for a while, hoping Winston’s screen time is going to pay off later in the film. The credits roll, though, without the character adding much of anything to the story.
In fact, a recurring theme seems to be that Holley didn’t do any of her story’s supporting players justice. Clocking in at 102 minutes, Sunshine Cleaning feels very abrupt, and taking the time to flesh out some of its side stories couldn’t have hurt.
In the end, the angle Jeffs and Holley take with this concept isn’t nearly as dark as one would expect, and that decision is what really brings the film down. Perhaps Sunshine Cleaning would have been best off embracing its identity as a black comedy with more vigor. Alas, that’s a film we will never see.
tfloyd1@umd.edu
RATING: 2.5 stars out of 5
