Sunshine Cleaning

What to say about Sunshine Cleaning...well, it’s not Little Miss Sunshine 2, which I’m afraid a lot of people who are coming to see it this weekend are thinking it’s going to be. It’s not being billed as a follow-up to the 2006 Best Pitcure nominee, but it has enough in common with the earlier picture to trade on both its quality and its success. It is, however, being billed as a comedy, which is somewhat disingenuous because comedies are funny and this movie isn’t; it’s not entirely devoid of humor, but what humor there is takes up all of about two minutes and thirty seconds (and it’s no coincidence that that’s about how long your average movie trailer is).

The rest of the not quite two hours is sort of a study in various forms of self-pity, and to say that the material is dark is to understate things a bit. It certainly tries to be funny, and there is a solid cast of characters (in the metaphorical sense); but quirky ensemble putting on a black comedy is Coen Brothers territory, and they have set the bar so high that most other attempts at the form - including Sunshine Cleaning - wind up looking like cheap imitations.

See...there’s Rose (Amy Adams), a single mother who doesn’t make enough money working as a maid - she cleans the houses of her classmates from the high school cheerleading days, all of whom apparently majored in gold-digging - to put her son through private school. Why does the son need private school? Seems that the administrators at the public school have wearied of the little boy’s increasingly bizarre pattern of behavior, including a spate of licking that culminated with him licking the teacher’s leg. So Rose gets a tip, from ex-boyfriend turned cop Mac (Steve Zahn, who appears to be on the Roger Clemens “workout” program), who is married to someone else but is still bagging Rose on the side, that she should go into crime scene cleanup, a potentially lucrative field experiencing a growth phase.

She ropes her sister Norah (Emily Blunt, wearing a lot of the things that Axl Rose apparently chose not to wear in the video for “Welcome To The Jungle”) into the fray, which is convenient because Norah can’t keep a job for very long and needs money in order to...well, buy eyeliner, I suppose. Also, because with only one girl, the scene where they take the mattress out to the dumpster would not have been as funny. Now, as these two dynamic bringers of light to the dark times in people’s lives find out, you can’t just dispose of biohazards in the dumpster. Actual quote from the movie: “Who knew?” But, with hard work and a bit of luck, they get better at what they do...and they grow as people...and they get in touch with their inner demons.

The girls have had a hard time over the years coping with the death of their mother, by suicide, when they were very young - old enough to understand what had happened, but too young to understand why. Some of the best scenes in the movie have Norah and Rose’s son Oscar trying in their own ways to make sense of death: Norah goes “trestling" (climbing the support posts of a train trestle all the way to the top and hanging there while the train passes) and thinks about death as the train hurtles by, and Rose’s son Oscar uses a CB radio to try talk to whatever god he made up to make himself feel less insecure about being alive. There’s a lot of existential potential in those scenes, but they are brief and the potential is wasted.

The filmmakers might have taken the road less traveled, down philosophical and expository paths, giving these two talented actresses a real chance to flex their chops; but instead, they referred to their film school Screenwriting 101 notebooks and invented a major crisis to force all the little crises to a head (sometimes this is called a “climax”) and then tied up all of the loose ends (except for the interesting cleaning supplies salesman who also builds model airplanes and only has one arm) into a neat little ball that is supposed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside (sometimes this is called “falling action”). And would you honestly believe that they work a cute little kitten into the ending, so as to all but ensure that warm, fuzzy feeling?

It’s such a crappy third act that if David Fincher had directed it and cast Brad PItt as the guy with one arm, you can bet it would be up for about half a dozen Oscars next year, including Best Visual Effects, just for making Brad’s arm disappear. If this film had actually been a comedy, the third act might have worked, even with the kitten included; but it just never got its funny legs under the morbid center of its dark, dramatic heart. Ultimately, it plays like a movie that isn’t sure if it wants to be serious or funny, and winds up spending so much time trying to be a bit of both that it never manages to do either one very well for very long.