So far the depth of comment about “Sunshine Cleaning” consists of the sinister connection of the word “Sunshine,” a van and Alan Arkin in Albuquerque.
No, this movie has nothing to do with “Little Miss Sunshine,” and that’s a good thing. “Sunshine Cleaning” rarely tries to force its quirkiness on you, and it’s got a sneaky way of rooting itself in the real world.
It revolves around two sisters. Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams) is the responsible one, but her life has idled since her prom-queen days in high school. She’s cleaning houses for a living and conducting a motel-room affair with her now-married ex (Steve Zahn).
Rose looks like a paragon of virtue next to Norah (Emily Blunt), who can’t hold down the stupidest kind of job (although she is available to baby-sit Rose’s young son). Salvation comes in Rose’s plan to run a crime-scene cleanup business.
Neither knows anything about the job; unaware, for instance, that tossing a blood-stained mattress into a dumpster might violate rules about biohazards. Well, live and learn.
Alan Arkin plays the sisters’ father, a man whose failed schemes suggest the genesis of his daughters’ self-defeating efforts.
Other odd types include Clifton Collins Jr., as a one-armed supply-store employee, and Mary Lynn Rajskub (from “24”), as a woman with a connection to a recent cleanup job.
Both are superb (Rajskub somehow has the ability to convey a complete, complex character just by the way she walks down the street), and neither story line works out quite the way you think. Or maybe at all.
The script, by Megan Holly, is the wobbliest part of the film. Made in a different way, you can see how this material could turn out to be just another “Little Miss Sunshine” clone, too cute and quirky.
Some early reviews have treated it that way, but they’re wrong. Director Christine Jeffs (who did an excellent film, “Rain,” in her native New Zealand, as well as “Sylvia”) gives the movie an adult texture, and her camera knows how to watch people and catch them in their weakest, most revealing moments.
As such, it’s a splendid showcase for Adams and Blunt, two deservedly rising stars. Adams, late of “Doubt” and “Enchanted,” is every inch the striving, bright-eyed older sister, while Blunt (“The Devil Wears Prada”), a Britisher, effortlessly slips into the shiftless mode of a down-home American.
This movie’s stronger on character and location than it is on plot; but in this case, character and location are plenty.
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