“Sunshine Cleaning”: Sanitary gripes

Dir. Christine Jeffs
(2009, R, 91 min)
★ ★

Sunshine Cleaning, if you’ll forgive the pun, is too neat. It hits its marks and plays its beats with utter competence, but in the end that’s all it amounts to: a series of marks and beats, hit and played but never authentically felt. Everything — from the conflicts to the outbursts to the back stories — feels like it’s been decided ahead of time and arrives on cue. Restlessness sets in by mid-point when we realize the film has nothing new to say to us.

The subject is inherently interesting: a crime scene and biohazard cleaning business. It’s clear that screenwriter Megan Holley was inspired by the dramatic potential of this unusual profession and organized a story around it, to the point where the opening scenes that introduce the premise feel contrived. I envision her process: How do I introduce my characters into this world of crime-scene cleanup? What if I make one of them a single mom who needs money for private school? And what if I make her boyfriend a cop with contacts in the business? Let’s make the cop married so we can explore her intimacy issues. And let’s give her a tragic history that lines up perfectly with her new line of work. The characters don’t make decisions. They are fastened to a one-rail track and embark on a predetermined journey.

The protagonist is Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams); even her surname is self-conscious in its quirky inelegance. There may be people named Lorkowski out there, but I wager few of them look like Amy Adams. I suppose the name is meant to endear her to us as an unpretentious Everywoman. Look! Up there! It’s Princess Giselle! No, that’s just Ms. Lorkowski.

Rose was once a popular cheerleader, but doesn’t have much to cheer about these days. Now in her 30s, she works as a maid, cleaning the houses of the people who used to look up to her in high school. She has a little sister, Nora (Emily Blunt), and if you’ve ever seen a movie or TV show about adult sisters you’ve probably already guessed that one is level-headed and responsible and the other is impetuous and devil-may-care. Nora is the latter; Rose takes care of her and resents her for it.

Rose has a young son, Oscar (Jason Spevack), who has behavior problems and whose father is out of the picture. Why does he have behavior problems, and why is his father out of the picture? The film isn’t interested in those questions. He fills the adorable-moppet requirement, saying cute or touching things and driving the plot when needed, as when he is kicked out of his public school for acting out.

Rose and Nora’s father is Joe, played by Alan Arkin, who has now cornered the market on curmudgeonly old coots who bond with young kids in indie comedies with “Sunshine” in the title. He gave more or less the same performance in Little Miss Sunshine, which despite its Academy Awards success is only a marginally better film than this one.

The sisters enter business as amateur crime scene cleaners. What fascinating work that is! How is one introduced to it? What personalities are drawn to it? How does one cope with its horrors? Holley’s script contains no such insights. She skims the details — bloodborne pathogen certification, proper disposal of biohazardous waste, and so on — but the job serves mostly as the backdrop for family and romantic conflicts. There is an eleven-minute documentary on the DVD called Sunshine Cleaning: A Fresh Look at a Dirty Business that includes two real-life cleaners who teach us more about the business than the film in its entire 91-minute running time. I would like to see a feature-length documentary about those women, their colleagues, their world view. This material is ripe to be explored by a filmmaker serious about exploring it.

What I wanted more than anything was for Sunshine Cleaning to surprise me. Just once. For a character to do or say something that isn’t set up three or four scenes in advance. To learn something about them we haven’t figured out in the first twenty minutes. It’s not a story. It’s a diagram.