| Sunshine Cleaning is a little too sunny A film about crime-scene cleanup lends itself perfectly to dark humour - unfortunately there's too much cream and sugar in this black comedy
C-
| SUNSHINE CLEANING
Now playing
Populated by unlikely characters penned rather idealistically by first-time screenwriter Megan Holley, Sunshine Cleaning is a regrettable bust featuring a solid cast.
Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams) is a broke- but-bright single mom in a doomed love affair with her high-school sweetheart, Mac (Steve Zahn). Despite the slight inconvenience of him already being married to another woman, Mac offers guidance on Rose's career woes.
Taking his advice, Rose teams up with her flighty, irresponsible sister Norah (Emily Blunt) and begins a business that offers an unusual service: detailed crime-scene cleanings. (You know, removing the bits of accrued gore left over from messy murders and suicides. Think Harvey Keitel, John Travolta and Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction.)
Rose's stated intentions are to save up enough dough to ensure her son's tuition for private school.
The sisters' rough-and-tumble dad, played by Alan Arkin, turns up to provide more manufactured eccentricity by spouting some stale get-rich-quick schemes. This tired bit of business defines the lazy caricature of the entire film, and the acting legend deserves better. Perhaps he's hoping his tonally similar performance will pay off as it did in Little Miss Sunshine: with a best supporting actor Academy Award.
Rose and Norah's initial misgivings and eventual acceptance of the vocation are what the film predominantly deals with. Unsurprisingly, the impact the murders have had on survivors' lives begins to affect both Rose and Norah, and the two learn neatly pre-packaged lessons about life and death. The sunshine in the title almost refers to the emotional service the duo will provide: unadvertised comfort for those dealing with distress.
New Zealand filmmaker Christine Jeffs doesn't see the black humour that practically screams to be let out here. The sinister post-murder situations are handled too soberly, with a few sidesteps early on in the interest of broad, but not quite biting, laughs.
In a film in which quirkiness reigns supreme over any actual sentiment, subtlety is not one of its strong suits. We're left with nothing but an airy, ineffective premise and characters without a shred of believability between them.
The film can't even score points for originality: the crime-scene clean-up idea has already been employed (better, I might add) by the little-seen, Tarantino-presented film, Curdled, from 1996.
— Aaron Graham |
Uptown
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