Sunshine Cleaning

Entertainment Weekly recently did a list of 50 stars they would watch in anything. I believe Amy Adams was on their list, and she is 100% on my list. This young actress has quickly become a favorite of mine combining peppy energy, youthful enthusiasm and a steely resolve to every character, Amy Adams is just so much fun to watch in anything. If you do not believe me go watch Cruel Intentions 2. The movie is awful, but you cannot stop watching her. With this knowledge, it does not really matter to me what the movie she is in is about, or who else is in it. This time around, though, she is with Alan Arkin in a movie that looks like Little Miss Sunshine, so it is essentially a win-win.

Rose(Adams) is a single mom trying her hardest to make a good life for her and her odd son. She gets help from her sister, Norah(Emily Blount) and her father(Arkin), but she is unfulfilled. She works for a maid service during the day and takes real estate classes at night. She is also having an affair with a police officer(Steve Zahn) who was her high school sweetheart. Living in the town where she was raised, Rose ends up cleaning the house of a former classmate, who is now married and pregnant and Rose cannot take this life anymore. She needs a change. The police officer tells her that cleaning up after crime scenes is a good racket. Rose pulls her resources and with her sister, starts cleaning up after crime scenes. The business is making her feel better and more productive, but the job is messy. She is an optimist and says that her job is helpful and that she comes into people's lives when they need help the most. As if she cannot clean up her life, but she can provide help for other people.

It is hard to make a movie that features so much suicide, a comedy. The material is just not funny enough for the bright and cheery title, or the kind of comedy the movie is trying to go for. I loved the performances and Amy Adams especially. Adams fully dives into the role and she is rewarded for her efforts with a winning, charming and heart breaking performance. There are a few moments of pure gold between her and Emily Blunt. Everyone does their best with the material, but I feel like the movie would have been better if it toned down the quirky attitude towards everything. The son is weird just to be weird and the Arkin character is a sort of salesman, just because he needs something quirky to do. I felt like much of the quirkiness of Little Miss Sunshine had a point. Here, it is quirky just to be quirky. That being said, there are some genuine laughs to be had at the circumstances and those laughs are properly milked to their full potential.

Indie movies have taken a sharp turn for the quirky and it has hit and miss like properties inherently, and Sunshine Cleaning misses more than it hits, sadly. I wanted the movie to give me something deeper and darker in dealing with cleaning up suicides, as the two sisters are revealed to have witnessed the suicide of their own mother. The connections were not deep enough or well developed enough. The music is appropriately indie and the camera work looks the way you imagine it should, but there is a better movie in this subject. The story is ripe for thoughts about life, death and growing up, but they are sacrificed for a vomit joke or a kid licking a wall just to be weird.

Amy Adams is not hurt by this movie, in fact, she rises above it many times and proves once again that she is infinitely watchable. She is still a little more bubbly than I think this character would be, but in the moments when she breaks down, we get the goods. I really loved her breakdown to the one armed man who worked at the supply store. In those moments I saw a better movie than I was watching. In the end, good performances and interesting subject matter fall by the way side as the writer and director try far too hard to copy the indie movies that birthed this kind of sub-genre of quirky dramedies. Boo.

Final Grade: C+