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It’s a dirty, stinking job, but…
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Who do you call after the CSI crew leaves a crime scene? Not Ghostbusters, of course. (Although, on second thought, they might be just the guys to clean up the slime left by a shotgun suicide.) A better bet, according to Megan Holley’s first screenplay, is Sunshine Cleaning.
The good news is that the two sisters running it are eager to please. The bad news is that your house might burn down. (How’s that for making a really clean start?) Your Siamese cat will be saved, however, on the other hand, it will not be returned.
After seeing Sunshine Cleaning, I found myself thinking of Pauline Kael’s quip in The New Yorker about the 1942 movie The Major and the Minor: the script “seems to have been concocted after the title.”
Aside from being the name of the service the girls provide, the title tells you nothing about the movie. (At least in the 1942 film, there was a major, Ray Milland. and a minor, sort of, Ginger Rogers.
Also, since it was produced by Big Beach Films, which also brought us the very popular Little Miss Sunshine (2006), they may have felt that “sunshine” was their passport to another success. Someone should tell these guys that lightning never strikes even once when the sun is shining.
There’s another cute (sort of) name in the movie: the maid service that one of the women, Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams), works for is Pretty Clean. But then you realize that it has a (perhaps unintentional) double meaning.The 1942 movie went beyond a cute title, thanks to a script by Charles Brackett and director Billy Wilder, including this great line: “Why don't you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?” The plot may have been silly, but it followed the admirable advice of the King of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland when the little girl asks where she should start telling her story: “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end, then stop.”
Instead of following such a trajectory, Sunshine Cleaning is all over the place (just like that shotgun suicide). Is it about Rose’s affair with a married man (Steve Zahn) ? Or her need to impress her high-school reunion (she was once the star cheerleader)? Or getting her son, Oscar (Jason Spevack), who likes to lick things and people, into a private school that will overlook his personal cleaning mission? Or finally grieving over the suicide of her mother? Or her relationship with her spacey father?
Or is it about the irresponsibility of her sister and partner, Norah (Emily Blunt)? After all, she was the one who turned that house into toast. Or her quixotic need to stalk and connect with a woman (Mary Lynn Rajskub) whose baby pictures she found in one of the houses she cleaned and their strained, pointless, lesbian relationship? Or Amy’s and Norah’s final acceptance of each other? .jpg)
Or…
But, like the movie, I digress. There are enough plot ideas here for a dozen full-length movies. Like so many first-time writers, Holley throws everything she can come up with into her script, hoping some of it will stick (and get cleaned up by you-know-who). Ruthless editing would have made this a leaner, more coherent movie, and the redactions could always have been adapted into their own screenplays. (“Thrift, Horatio!”) Director Christine Jeffs, apparently, just went with the flow…right up to the feel-good (or should I say, “sunny”?) ending.
The cast is personable, including Clifton Collins Jr. as a one-armed cleaning-supply store attendant. But I am sorry to see Alan Arkin reduced to playing shtick (flaky old men); he deserves better. When he died in Little Miss Sunshine, so did the last ray of sunshine in that overrated movie.
This time around, it’s the movie that dies.
You can watch the trailer here.
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Here we go again. Another movie that feels compelled to reassure you right from the start that it is based on true events. Reassure you? Yes, …
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