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Sunshine Cleaning

Unmaking a Mess

The best part of Pulp Fiction, if you ask me (okay, but let’s pretend you did), was the sequence in which hit men John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson accidentally kill someone in their car and have to cover it up. They call in a specialist in the field, Winston (Harvey Keitel), and for once in this movie that is an exaggerated fantasy of criminal life, we are invited to ponder what the real daily hassles of people like these could be like.

Amy Adams and Emily Blunt in Sunshine Cleaning

For the rest of the 1990s, Pulp Fiction was the paradigm of the “indie” movie. The new paradigm, the one that inspires thousands of would-be screenwriters to slave over their word processors on stories they hope will make them the next Sundance favorite, is something more like Little Miss Sunshine or Juno, stories about families who deal with traumas through grit and witty pop-culture references.

Sunshine Cleaning, about two sisters who get into Winston’s line of work, was a hit at the 2008 Sundance Festival. It’s from the same production company that made Little Miss Sunshine, and that tells you everything you need to know. The stories have nothing to do with each other, but Cleaning is relentlessly familiar in ways that you may not be able to put your finger on until the whole thing is over and you realize that it’s not going to go anywhere surprising.

Amy Adams and Emily Blunt star as sisters Rose and Norah Norkowski of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Being of 50 percent Polish descent, I would like to take this opportunity to say that one of the movie clichés I hate the most is giving characters Polish names to indicate that they are stupid, lazy, or, as is the case here, simply losers. End of rant.

Rose is a former cheerleader whose life has been all downhill since high school. She still sleeps with Mac (Steve Zahn), her high school sweetheart, despite the fact that he married someone else. She raises their son on her own with some help from her father, Joe (Alan Arkin), a salesman always on the hunt for a new get-rich-quick scheme. With a job as a house cleaner, she’s a model of stability compared to younger Norah, who still lives with Dad and has trouble holding on to work (or caring).

Mac is now a police detective, and, after he overhears the rate a team of professional cleaners charges to tidy up after a messy public suicide, suggests that it might be a more lucrative line of work for Rose than cleaning the bedrooms of spoiled suburban teenagers. He gives them some referrals, and soon they’re holding their noses while scrubbing away bloodstains and disposing of unspeakable mattresses.

A job like this offers limitless opportunities for voyeurism, if only after the fact: Rose and Norah (and of course we the audience) get to peer into the places inhabited by sad and desperate people, and to ponder what drove them to violence. Norah takes this more personally, going so far as to track down a woman (Mary Lynn Rajskub) whose photo she finds in the purse of a dead drunk.

Actually, we the viewer get to indulge our voyeurism a lot less than do the sisters Norkowski. Those of you hoping for a black comedy about an unusual job will be disappointed, as the gruesome stuff is kept to a minimum. Instead, their new job brings Rose and Norah in touch with deep-seated traumas of their own, particularly the loss of their mother.

(As such, the story would make more emotional sense if the job of cleaning up after dead bodies was one that either of them sisters pursued rather than something they fell into: It would be interesting to watch them become aware that the job appealed to them as a way for unconscious pains to get into the open air.)

Like so many movies of this kind, Sunshine Cleaning is watchable simply for the cast. Amy Adams and Emily Blunt are always fun to watch, as is Arkin, even if he’s already done the crochety old guy routine to death in other movies. The usually nerdy Steve Zahn was an odd choice for Rose’s married boyfriend, though he probably makes the part more interesting than the script intended. Same for Clifton Collins Jr., who has been good in small parts in a lot of movies without yet achieving name recognition. As a cleaning supply clerk who fills Rose in on the fine points of the business, he seems to have been forgotten by the scripter halfway through, but we want to see more of him.

I didn’t hate Sunshine Cleanin g: It’s a passable timekiller, and there are certainly worse movies on offer right now. But there wasn’t a lot here that I will remember a month down the line.


Watch the trailer for Sunshine Cleaning



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