Sunshine Cleaning does not need to be a movie. That’s less of an insult than it sounds like, because I don’t so much mean “Sunshine Cleaning should not exist” as “Sunshine Cleaning would best reach its potential in another medium.” This is a novella dressed up like an indie film.
The story follows Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams), a down-at-the-heels single mother who, at the start, is scratching out a living cleaning houses. She’s having an affair with a married cop, her old high school sweetheart Mac (Steve Zahn). She feels like she’s going nowhere, but she’s successful and put-together in comparison to her younger sister, Norah (Emily Blunt), who still lives with their father and who can’t seem to hold down a job. Following a tip from Mac, Rose and Norah start a crime scene cleanup business they barely know how to run. After a rocky start of accepting low bids and tossing hazardous waste in random dumpsters, they gradually segue into … lying about being certified to deal with biohazards and failing to get insurance, but in an emotionally involved and empathetic kind of way. And they get PPE, thank God.
Rose and Norah’s mother killed herself when they were young, and they were the ones to discover her afterwards. That harrowing moment, and the illness and absence to either side of it, left marks on their lives that they can’t scrub away. It’s cathartic, then, to eradicate something, to make the signs of trauma disappear. It’s too bad that of the film’s missteps is making this connection too explicit, with Rose giving an impassioned speech defending the emotional value of her newfound career.
The characters’ own emotional clean-up is more difficult–and also involves a kind of spreading-out of hazardous waste. Norah develops an obsession with Lynn (Mary Lynn Rajskub), the daughter of a hoarder whose death served as one of their early jobs; Lynn reads Norah’s interest as romantic, but Norah’s futilely looking for a mirror, not a lover. Meanwhile, Rose finally breaks things off with Mac after a confrontation with his wife, but while her nascent relationship with cleaning supply store owner Winston (Clifton Collins Jr.) is better for her, it’s hard to see what Winston is getting out of it. (I’m guessing the answer is “Amy Adams.”) This nice, laid-back guy covers for her business’s growing pains, and in return, Rose taps him as a last-minute babysitter, dumping her son on him so she can go to a baby shower–and then he’s enlisted into attending the kid’s otherwise-all-family birthday party.
The treatment of Lynn and Winston is a big problem for Sunshine Cleaning, because despite Rose’s speech about her work letting her be there for people on the worst day of their lives, both sisters never quite grow beyond a certain selfishness. That improperly disposed-of waste isn’t just a limp comedic beat, it’s a symptom, a synecdoche for the whole problem–you can’t escape the feeling that other people aren’t quite real to them. Repeatedly, safety regulations are framed as meaningless bureaucratic obstacles the characters the characters can’t anticipate. Smacking into them is supposed to provide some comedic value–it doesn’t, but that’s just because this isn’t a very funny movie–but also some pathos about the characters’ stifled growth. But this isn’t Man Push Cart. There’s no there there, no real weight of desperation and no suggestion that anything put into place for other people’s benefit means anything. Rose and Norah are empathetic towards their clients, but that’s partly because they see themselves in them. The film should do better on that front than its characters do, but it mostly doesn’t.
The one exception is the scene where Lynn finds out that, in a sense, she was never really “real” to Norah. She’s the three-dimensional copy of the pilfered photo Norah’s been carrying around, a chance for Norah to believe in mother-daughter love that transcends death. Lynn gets to tell Norah how profoundly uncomfortable this makes her and point out that her actual story doesn’t match the one Norah wants to tell herself, and it’s a good scene … but having it be the end of Lynn’s plotline weakens it just a little. Norah’s quasi-flirtation with Lynn–who clearly assumes they’re dating–could have been a way for Norah to connect with someone, to broaden her world, if it had been real at all, but it’s not. Lynn disappears the moment Norah’s learned her lesson, and Norah never seeks her out again–not for an apology and certainly not for company or love.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia could nail the comedy side of this, including the way the film introduces horrific tragedy–like an opening featuring a man’s suicide–and then blows right past it. The Gang blatantly disregarding health and safety regulations would make for a great episode–the scene where Norah falls face-first into a filthy, blood-soaked mattress while Rose cracks up about it would be pitch-perfect with Dee in Norah’s role. Sunshine Cleaning can’t be that funny, and that’s fine, I’ll take a gentle dramedy, but it flops when it tries to derive humor from its characters acting like dicks but doesn’t seem to want you to think they’re acting like dicks. It wants you to think that its characters have flaws, because well-drawn characters do, but it doesn’t want them to mean anything. That might jeopardize the wistful indie tone. It just doesn’t work to flirt with realism–muted tone, socioeconomic stresses, trauma, psychological damage–and then restrict the scope of that realism so tightly.
To take us back to the start, this would all work better as prose, where we could have a more in-depth look at Rose’s character and growth. There are a few naturally cinematic sequences here, like Norah’s “trestling” or the search for a particular movie scene, but most of the action is internal, and that’s a better fit for literature than for film. A tight POV would also make the supporting characters’ obvious NPC status less galling, because that would be Rose’s flaw rather than the narrative’s. A literary novella would also feel less like it has to push for the sunnier ending–you’d be more likely to see, say, Winston pulling back from Rose, which would add some more emotional realism and texture. It also wouldn’t have the casting issue: Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, and Alan Arkin are all terrific, and they do good work here, but their presence rigs the movie towards insisting on their likability in a way that’s detrimental to the halting, poignant character growth and charater stagnation. (Like I said, I feel like the Winston plotline only makes sense if you take “because Amy Adams” as an explanation.) I think this could easily be a story worth reading if it leaned into its protagonists’ flaws in its exploration of how they painfully outgrew them. Right now, though, it falls flat.
Sunshine Cleaning is streaming on Tubi, Prime, Roku, Peacock, and Starz.
