Sunshine Cleaning misses spots

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Rose Lorkowski had it all in high school: looks, popularity, a hotshot all-state boyfriend. Fast forward a decade or so and Rose, played by the remarkable Amy Adams, is a maid, cleaning up other people’s messes and creating some of her own. She’s still sleeping with her high school guy—Steve Zahn’s dopey and married police investigator—while she raises a son on her own and tries her best to keep her wild-child little sister Norah—played by Emily Blunt—somewhere in the vicinity of the straight and narrow. Making ends meet is difficult, and when she pulls her son out of public school after the principal demands that Oscar get therapy and take medication to help him focus, she is forced to come up with a lot more money to pay for a private education.

On a tip from Zahn, Rose gets into the niche business of cleaning up the biohazardous messes left behind at crime scenes and in dead people’s homes. The work is disgusting but the cash comes fast. More problems follow, though, as Rose and Norah work together to make Sunshine Cleaning a success and Zahn’s wife finds out about their affair.

Sunshine Cleaning wants to be a great story, and for that, this consistently maudlin film does contain a handful of moments that really fly: The brief shot of young Oscar decked out in his mom’s scrubs and checking himself in the side view mirror of her new van, sparks swirling around Norah’s head as she gleefully hangs from the railroad trellis shouting deep into the night sky, the heartbreaking automatic stop when Rose and Norah finally catch a television broadcast of their late mother’s cameo appearance in an old movie; the first time they have seen her since she committed suicide when they were young.

Unfortunately whole sections are misguided. When a sincere Oscar uses a CB radio to talk to God it is whole-heartedly touching. When Rose speaks into it to reach out to her dead mother, it’s over the top. Even worse, some 20 minutes of screen time is wasted on a Norah subplot that hardly goes anywhere. She stalks, then befriends the daughter of their first client—a drunk who died and left her trailer home a hoarder’s mess—with the intention of returning to her a stack of childhood photos. The daughter, 24’s Mary Lynn Rajskub, mistakes Norah’s fast friendship as a sexual advance. Another example of life being a confusing mess perhaps, but these scenes feel like part of a different film altogether and reveal very little about Norah that we don’t already get from scenes between her, Rose and Oscar.

Loose ends like these make Cleaning’s brief, indie-riffic run time seem blunted and a little forced. It’s nice that director Christine Jeffs avoided any trademark Hollywood melodrama in the third act, but a little more closure would have been even nicer. Adams and Blunt are certainly two of their generation’s top theatrical talents, and seeing them play off each other as archetypical sisters-at-odds has its rewards. They bring plenty of sunshine to Cleaning. It’s just too bad that most everything else around them feels like a mess.