• Directed by Christine Jeffs
• Written by Megan Holley
• Starring
  • Amy Adams
  • Emily Blunt
  • Alan Arkin
  • Jason Spevack
  • Steve Zahn

There’s a measure of irony to be expected whenever a bright, cheery word like “sunshine” is used in a movie title (almost as much as with the word “American”). That irony is front and center in Sunshine Cleaning, which is the name of a crime scene and biohazard cleanup company. Company founder Rose (Amy Adams of Julie & Julia (2009)) intended the name to put a brighter spin on a dreary situation, and that attitude is reflective of the movie as a whole, populated by semi-desperate people in dead-end situations who are nevertheless trying to see and accentuate the positive in their lives.

Don’t forget to floss.

Rose herself is a thirtysomething single mother, a former cheerleading captain who never amounted to much after that; she works for a maid service while studying for a real estate license. She’s also maintaining a wham-bam affair with Mac (Steve Zahn), the former quarterback she dated in high school, now a police detective who married one of her classmates. Her younger sister Norah (Emily Blunt) is on an even lower level of ambition; she floats from one minimum-wage job to another while still living with their dad Joe (Alan Arkin), a man who has made a life chasing but never catching the American entrepreneurial dream.

The Sunshine Cleaning business comes about when Rose starts looking into private schooling for her seven-year-old son Oscar (Jason Spevack), an intelligent but undersocialized child who just got expelled for obsessively licking things, including a teacher’s leg. Mac had just barely mentioned to her the large fees charged by crime scene cleaners during one of their motel trysts, so she enlists Norah to help her start her own service for that niche.

Time to flip the mattress.

There’s surprisingly little squeamishness on the part of either one, beyond the simple”ick” reaction of bad smells or textures; I don’t know if I could clean up blood in the shower or the rotten spot on a mattress as easily as they do, especially as neophytes. This is partially a comedy, much of which revolves around light pratfalls and faux pas as they learn on the job the do’s and don’t’s of crime scene clean up. But it’s also a drama which would be spoiled by either the callousness of black comedy or gross-out gags, so the depths to which “decomp humor” could be taken in the hands of a Farrellyesque mindset are thankfully avoided.

Must be ticklish.

Sunshine Cleaning has effortlessly good acting and more than a little bit of charm, as Rose juggles her out-of-school son with her father and tries to hustle up business without seeming bloodthirsty, and while she and Norah both gradually exhibit the psychological scars of their own mother’s death in their childhood — a “do-it-yourself job,” as Norah puts it. The movie does come across as uneven, though, with subplots and themes which vanish long before the movie as a whole does, with her relationship with Mac being the biggest offender. While I’m behind her quitting her role as The Other Woman in Mac’s life, I’d really appreciate it if someone in her position broke it off because she realized that what she was doing was bad, instead of just not fulfilling.

If you’ve never scooped out a bathtub full of decomposing shrimp, you really haven’t lived.

I guess that points to what keeps this a good little movie instead of a great little movie: despite it being a character-based drama (with comedic overtones), I get little sense of the characters as having grown particularly by the end, especially in relation to the plot events on which the movie starts and finishes. Does Rose ever manage to get Oscar into a private school? Does Norah finally see the need to find or create some direction in her life? I realize that real life doesn’t come in prepackaged little episodes in which all of one’s personal narrative threads cleanly and concurrently tie themselves up, but fiction is meant to be more artful and structured than real life; at the very least, I expect to finish a movie with a gut understanding of the general trajectory of the characters’ lives following from the events in the story, and I don’t really feel that I have this here. So what little disappointment this movie generates comes from the feeling as the credits roll that the story is really unfinished.

I do love me a woman in uniform.

On the other hand, this movie has the best supporting role for a one-armed vacuum retailer and model airplane enthusiast that I’ve seen in, like, forever. So you really can’t come out of this movie feeling that you’re ill-served.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 8 (mostly implied, as we only see one corpse on screen)
• breasts: 0 (though apparently there are 2 in the non-U.S. version)
• pasty male butts: 1
• dream sequences: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 3
  • Clifton Collins Jr. (“Winston,” the one-armed vacuum retailer) played “Ayel” in the 2009 feature Star Trek
  • Paul Dooley (“Sherm”) played “Enebran Tain” in several episodes of DS9
  • Judith Jones (“Paula,” one of Rose’s old classmates) played “Edo Girl” in the TNG episode “Justice”