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Review -- Sunshine Cleaning
Sunshine Cleaning (2008)
Director: Christine Jeffs
Starring: Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Alan Arkin
Canadian Rating: 14A
3.5 stars out of 4 (Very Good)
Sunshine Cleaning hits DVD retail/rental shelves tomorrow.
By Albert Tam
One part comedy, two parts melodrama, Sunshine Cleaning is a movie that’s full of loose ends and sometimes questionable plotting but is nevertheless a finely acted and surprisingly touching film that affects us more than we thought it would.
Amy Adams and Emily Blunt play Rose and Norah, two sisters of a dysfunctional family whose father Joe (Alan Arkin) spends his time buying excess cargo from truck drivers and attempts to sell it himself for some quick cash. Rose is involved in an affair with her high school sweetheart (Steve Zahn) who is married to another woman and when she finds out her son (Jason Spevack) is being kicked out of public school for strange behaviour, she needs some cash to send him to a private school. Enter her sister Norah, unemployed and living with her father and they decide to start a little business called “Sunshine Cleaning” which involves cleaning up after crime scenes. It’s not the prettiest business to be in, but we can tell this job means something a lot more to these two sisters.
What it means and why it becomes so important to them, I won’t say, but there is a perfect balance of humour, heartbreak, and charisma to the performances of the two leads. Amy Adams and Emily Blunt certainly don’t look like sisters, but more importantly is that they feel like sisters who are trying to discover themselves in the mess that they live in. If these actresses were any less, many of the scenes in Sunshine Cleaning would come off as over the top or laughable but they carry this film and ground the script into this harsh reality. Through tears and smiles, these two women are in top acting form here, especially Adams who has been recently relegated to different forms of the unknowing Disney princess (i.e. Enchanted, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, and Doubt).
Alan Arkin arguably provides the most laughs as the grumpy father and while it doesn’t feel like much of a stretch from his Little Miss Sunshine role, I say if it works with the movie, it works with the movie and no point changing a thing.
Now as I stated above, there are some problems with this picture: secondary characters that feel important to the action of the film but are forgotten about, scenes that sometimes feel like a shortcut to tragedy, but the more I look back on it the more I feel these flaws were irrelevant. Sunshine Cleaning is still a very good film that packs a solid emotional punch that doesn’t force its way into our tear ducts. Because of Adams and Blunt, the movie feels like it’s genuinely working towards achieving its goal and that’s really important to make a movie of this sort succeed. It also doesn’t hurt that it gives us a few bittersweet smiles along the way.
Even though I left Sunshine Cleaning neither laughing nor crying like some audience members might, I knew I had watched something quite good. It’s not a heavy movie about life lessons or emotional trauma when someone we know is lost, just about people. And it’s the people here that make this imperfect movie so very satisfying.
Director: Christine Jeffs
Starring: Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Alan Arkin
Canadian Rating: 14A
3.5 stars out of 4 (Very Good)
Sunshine Cleaning hits DVD retail/rental shelves tomorrow.
By Albert Tam
One part comedy, two parts melodrama, Sunshine Cleaning is a movie that’s full of loose ends and sometimes questionable plotting but is nevertheless a finely acted and surprisingly touching film that affects us more than we thought it would.
Amy Adams and Emily Blunt play Rose and Norah, two sisters of a dysfunctional family whose father Joe (Alan Arkin) spends his time buying excess cargo from truck drivers and attempts to sell it himself for some quick cash. Rose is involved in an affair with her high school sweetheart (Steve Zahn) who is married to another woman and when she finds out her son (Jason Spevack) is being kicked out of public school for strange behaviour, she needs some cash to send him to a private school. Enter her sister Norah, unemployed and living with her father and they decide to start a little business called “Sunshine Cleaning” which involves cleaning up after crime scenes. It’s not the prettiest business to be in, but we can tell this job means something a lot more to these two sisters.
What it means and why it becomes so important to them, I won’t say, but there is a perfect balance of humour, heartbreak, and charisma to the performances of the two leads. Amy Adams and Emily Blunt certainly don’t look like sisters, but more importantly is that they feel like sisters who are trying to discover themselves in the mess that they live in. If these actresses were any less, many of the scenes in Sunshine Cleaning would come off as over the top or laughable but they carry this film and ground the script into this harsh reality. Through tears and smiles, these two women are in top acting form here, especially Adams who has been recently relegated to different forms of the unknowing Disney princess (i.e. Enchanted, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, and Doubt).
Alan Arkin arguably provides the most laughs as the grumpy father and while it doesn’t feel like much of a stretch from his Little Miss Sunshine role, I say if it works with the movie, it works with the movie and no point changing a thing.
Now as I stated above, there are some problems with this picture: secondary characters that feel important to the action of the film but are forgotten about, scenes that sometimes feel like a shortcut to tragedy, but the more I look back on it the more I feel these flaws were irrelevant. Sunshine Cleaning is still a very good film that packs a solid emotional punch that doesn’t force its way into our tear ducts. Because of Adams and Blunt, the movie feels like it’s genuinely working towards achieving its goal and that’s really important to make a movie of this sort succeed. It also doesn’t hurt that it gives us a few bittersweet smiles along the way.
Even though I left Sunshine Cleaning neither laughing nor crying like some audience members might, I knew I had watched something quite good. It’s not a heavy movie about life lessons or emotional trauma when someone we know is lost, just about people. And it’s the people here that make this imperfect movie so very satisfying.
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