Sunshine Cleaning

so I promised that I would get around to talking about Sunshine Cleaning... as per my thesis (so to speak) for this blog I promised I would be writing about one new movie a week meaning this blog is late. Shame on me. But hey, better late than never. So here it is... thoughts on Sunshine Cleaning which was released on DVD this past Tuesday....

Sunshine Cleaning is the story of Rose (Amy Adams), a single mother juggling a dead end job as a maid cleaning the homes of high school classmates who have gone on to lead much more successful lives, a sister Norah (Emily Blunt) who cannot keep a steady job, an affair with her now married high school boyfriend Mac (Steve Zahn), and a child so imaginative and perhaps so smart (maybe) that his teachers don't know how to deal with him. So what's a girl to do?

Norah pulls her son Oscar out of school and most of the time leaves him in the care of her father Joe (Alan Arkin) who spends most of his time trying to sell various products to businesses out of the trunk of his car, while she starts up her crime scene clean up business at the urging of boyfriend Mac who happens to be a cop. With me so far?

So as you can see Sunshine Cleaning throws a lot at you very quickly and this is overall problem with the film as most of these threads never really come together to form a cohesive story. The performances are great - no surprise there as the cast is stacked with great talent. There are glimpses of the movie that could be but they don't last all that long.

Sunshine Cleaning is brought to you by some of the folks behind Little Miss Sunshine and with that in mind I expected a comedy with some dramatic turns that anchor all the quirkiness in reality but Cleaning is much more drama than comedy and the characters definitely have their quirks but there's just some piece of the puzzle that's missing. Or maybe there's too many pieces to the puzzle. The story is fractured.

Don't get me wrong though. The movie is far from terrible... it's just not really great either. It's ok. The performances are solid, the ending leaves a lot unsaid but answers enough questions to leave you satisfied. My recommendation would be to give it a shot if anything I've said has piqued your interest at all. You won't be left feeling like you've wasted your time.

That said... we can cross Sunshine Cleaning off The Movie List.