Sunshine Cleaning, a quirky indie picture staring Amy Adams, originally released in 2008, has finally made it to Taiwan for a mainstream release, possibly with the idea of picking up on some of the massive publicity which surrounded the release of Julie & Julia (2009) earlier this year, which brought Adams to prominence with local audiences. It also reveals to us that Adams is a more sophisticated actress than her role as Julie Powell gave her the opportunity to show.
This is an old-fashioned film in that it relies heavily on a fine script and interesting characters to drive the story forward, but it also has a gloss of indie chic about it, which links it up with recent hits such as Little Miss Sunshine and Juno. For better or for worse, it doesn’t have the same edginess as either of these films, and its indie appeal is something of a pose.
Sunshine Cleaning opens with a man walking into a gun shop with a 20 gauge shotgun cartridge in his pocket. He asks to inspect some guns, then uses one to blow his head off. The resultant mess is clearly a tragedy for someone, but it also represents a business opportunity for those specializing in the cleanup operation.
The rest of the film follows this formula of tragedy leading to opportunity, and we know that despite all the obstacles that the main character faces in getting her life together, she will inevitably succeed. This makes the tragedy of life just a little too facile for the film’s own good, and fatally undermines its attempts to achieve real indie street cred.
Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams) is a former high school cheerleader now eking out a somewhat precarious life as a maid. She is having an affair with police officer Mac (Steve Zahn), who she knows deep in her heart will never leave his wife Heather, a former schoolmate. As Rose is in desperate need money to pay her son’s tuition, Mac helps her connect with the crime scene cleanup business, and Sunshine Cleaning is born. Rose is insecure, having failed to provide herself with a husband, or become part of an acceptable profession that will put her on the same social footing as her high school friends. Her ambition is to be a real estate agent. Her efforts to achieve a solid, tiresome middle-class respectability are hampered by her slacker sister Norah (Emily Blunt) and father (Alan Arkin), a small-time scam artist.
The messy business of crime scene cleanup serves as a remarkably good springboard for Megan Holley’s script, which opts for a thoughtful humor rather than picking up easy gross out jokes. The main complaint about Sunshine Cleaning is that it takes on too much, and a subplot that involves Norah tracking down the daughter of a deceased woman whose house she helps Rose clean out is left hanging mid-movie. It is a sign of the film’s quality that even this loose end vibrates with dramatic potential before it is unceremoniously dropped. For the rest, it sometimes seems that Holley is trying to incorporate every possible device and character type ever used in light comedy into this film. There are some excellent moments, and just when you hope the director will pursue a particular line, it is dropped and another device is introduced.
One of the highlights of Sunshine Cleaning is the performance of Alan Arkin as Joe Lorkowski, a character who has the wisdom of the deeply flawed personality. Although the role is not quite up to the same levels of weirdness that he displayed as Grandpa Edwin Hoover in Little Miss Sunshine, it is still full of a skewed vitality, and hints at depths that the efficient and sometimes all too slick performances of Adams and Blunt fail to provide.
Sunshine Cleaning is a deeply enjoyable film to watch, though it promises more than it actually delivers. It has good intentions, but the film is too programmatic, the careful nuts and bolts of its structure all proudly on display. Any organic unity, and the satisfying feeling that goes along with that, are lost in this display of technical prowess.
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