It’s indicative of the extent to which gallows humour has been absorbed, commoditized and made cozily “offbeat” by the movies when we see something as essentially unsullied by mortality as Sunshine Cleaning open with a shotgun suicide in an Albuquerque hardware store and almost immediately cut to gags about brain fragments staining the merchandise. The gruesome aftermath of death is incorporated right into screenwriter Megan Holley’s premise, which finds two 30ish sisters entering the local crime scene clean-up industry. This idea of two women whose own lives seem a mess hurling themselves into the grunt work of eliminating the traces of others’ trauma, despair and resignation is a rich one, but don’t let it fool you into thinking that Little Miss Sunshine Cleaning—the film shares more than just producers, “sunshine” and Alan Arkin with that 2006 indie hit—is any sort of comic trailblazer. It’s got just enough quirk to seem an alternative to the most pedestrian mainstream fare, but the familiarity creeps in early, accumulating until the final act assumes the whiff of something cobbled directly from a screenwriting handbook.
Thank goodness for Amy Adams, whose frustrated single mom Rose offers the actress a welcome step toward playing a somewhat less innocent character. I say somewhat because Rose, the high school cheerleader who once dated Steve Zahn’s football captain, now married with children and meeting for quickies in some fleabag called, I kid you not, the Crossroads Motel, is at times forced to behave naïvely just to help grease the gears of Sunshine Cleaning’s wrote trajectories of self discovery. Still, Adams is pretty delightful doing dirty things and her desperation is at times truly touching.
Emily Blunt, who played the reluctant pal to Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada, gets to transgress more interestingly as Rose’s sister Norah, who can’t hold down a job, seems stuck in a pattern of adolescent rebelliousness, and, in the movie’s most intriguing subplot, stalks a woman, marvelously underplayed by Mary Lynn Rajskub, whose photos she finds stashed amidst the belongings of a suicide. But it’s in this storyline that Sunshine Cleaning really reveals its limitations. The consequences of Norah’s genuinely creepy perusal of a friendship—and perhaps more—with this introverted woman nearly approach something resonant, yet Norah ends the movie by suddenly announcing she’s going on a road trip, which reads as lazy screenwriter shorthand for “I’m going to find myself.”
Arkin, charming as always, plays the kooky dad; there’s a tyke that licks things; there’s a requisite absent parent everyone’s still grieving; there’s an almost interesting one-armed man played by Clifton Collins Jr. who really could have spiced things up if given a chance to become a real character. (And I really wanted to know how he braided his hair.) Director Christine Jeffs, who made the not uninteresting Sylvia, seems above all to be trying to remain anonymous, but the result is mostly just further emphasis on the movie’s most un-engagingly generic qualities (not to mention some pretty awkward camerawork just to steer clear of Collins' supposedly absent arm). None of this is to say you won’t have a few laughs, wonder about some of the more potentially interesting subtexts, or feel a little empathy for Sunshine Cleaning’s characters, but neither with their stories stick with you once the scouring is through.
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