Sunshine Cleaning (***½)

Directed by: Christine Jeffs
Starring: Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Alan Arkin, Steve Zahn, Jason Spevack, Mary Lynn Rajskub
Seen: June 20th 2009

***½ Out of ****

Sunshine Cleaning continues a trend I’ve picked up on over the last 5 years. A movie with the word Sunshine in the title will be a good one for me (touch wood). Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind kicked it off in 2004, then Little Miss Sunshine in 2006, and Sunshine (an all-time favourite) in 2007. Now Sunshine Cleaning comes along and duly upholds the trend.

Rose Lorkowski (Adams) was on the cheering squad in high school, and dated the coolest guy in school. Now a thirty-something mother, Rose works for a housekeeping company, and she is confronted by those she was “better than” in high school who now have settled lives, which makes her feel pretty inadequate. To add to this, she is involved with a married man, Mac (Zahn), who does not seem to be headed towards a divorce in order to be with her.

Mac is a police officer, and one night, during one of their motel trysts, he tells her of an opportunity in the cleaning business. Earlier that day a man had committed suicide in a sports goods store and the cleaning company involved charged a rather substantial amount of money for the cleanup. Rose tries to capitalise on this as soon as possible, and drags her drifter-sister, Norah (Blunt) headfirst into crime-scene cleanup. Norah now has a company of her own, and the jump in status it affords her is remarkable, even through some elements of learning about the industry of cleaning up bio-hazards.

Norah is a bit of a leach, as she still lives with her father Joe (Arkin), and has no difficulty getting fired from her job as a waitress at a local fast-food joint. She helps Rose to look after her son, Oscar (Spevack), when Rose goes out to meet up with Mac, and tells him the ghost stories Rose asks her not to. The two sisters also share a dark past, and as they continue with their small company it starts to catch up with them.

The film has glorious moments of tragedy and beauty as the sisters live in the moment (a great scene with Emily Blunt climbing into the supporting structure under a suspended railway track), remember the past (a shared moment as the sisters notice something on television, and also some other darker memories), and plan for a future despite somewhat disastrous occurrences. The music fits perfectly and the humour is placed liberally within some heavier moments. Adams and Blunt are great as the two sisters, and Arkin does pretty much the same father figure he did in Little Miss Sunshine (without the dying), while Zahn is almost surprising as a serious character without his usual antics as comic relief.

Sunshine Cleaning is a beautiful film about a small family dealing with things as they come along, and supporting each other along the way. It is inevitable that during the normal hardships life throws at you to lose hope from time to time, but with a supportive family present you can easily pick up the pieces and start running again, as Sunshine Cleaning shows with grace and self-assurance, allowing you to leave the cinema with a smile on your face and in your soul, and a strange craving for some Pecan Pie…