Sunshine Cleaning (Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Alan Arkin, Steve Zahn, Clifton Collins Jr.) – Produced by the same team that brought you that other “sunshine” movie, Little Miss Sunshine, this film brings you red-hot actresses Amy Adams with Brit Emily Blunt in this look at the trials and tribulations of a troubled family. The trailer leads you to believe this is a madcap comedy but it’s anything but that. Like its Miss Sunshine counterpart, it has its amusing moments and its quirky characters but it is mostly a serious film. Oscar nominee (for Doubt) Amy Adams plays Rose Lorkowski, underachiever and former high school cheerleader and prom queen, who is now a single mother. She is struggling through life as a Merry/Molly Maids-type house-cleaner in Albuquerque. Her son is curious, precocious, and a discipline problem. Her sister, Norah (Blunt of The Devil Wears Prada, Dan in Real Life, Charlie Wilson’s War) is lazy, troubled, and tortured. Their loving but cranky father is played by Alan Arkin, who plays a character similar to the one he played for these producers in Little Miss Sunshine. There won’t be an Academy Award in this performance. But Arkin’s character, Joe Lorkowski, is the most grounded person in the family and often looks out for and gives advice to Rose’s son, Oscar (Jason Spevack). The family has been haunted for years by the suicide of Joe’s wife, a would-be actress who once had a one-line speaking role in a movie. In many ways, her suicide hovers over the entire film.
All of the performances and layered here. Blunt’s character is the hardest to like. As an actress, she has that tremendous ability to look gorgeous or pouty and to act mean or playful. Adams has proven she can play innocent (Enchanted), flighty (Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day), and serious (Doubt), and her range is obvious here. Steve Zahn, steady as always, plays the cop with whom Rose is having an affair and who suggests that she gets into her own business cleaning up after capital crimes. She and her sister start as an innocent and soon learn that cleaning up after murders and suicides is ugly business. But the story is really about the relationship between the sisters, their father, the son, the cop and the owner of a store that sells industrial strength cleaning supplies (played brilliantly by Clifton Collins Jr. of Capote). What this film lacks in pacing and purpose, it makes up in acting and is well worth the time.