Stop me if you have seen this one before. A dysfunctional but likeable American family with secrets and lies to hide find themselves caught up in a world of which they know little.
Sunshine Cleaning (15)
***
Dir: Christine Jeffs
With: Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Alan Arkin
Stop me if you have seen this one before.
A dysfunctional but likeable American family with secrets and lies to hide find themselves caught up in a world of which they know little. Thrown out of their comfort zone, the hapless crew are forced to confront jagged truths about themselves and each other. Indie charmer Little Miss Sunshine, circa 2006? No, indie charmer hopeful Sunshine Cleaning, June 2009.
It is an easy mistake to make, given the two films have in common a star, Alan Arkin, a set of quirky sensibilities and a couple of producers.
That is where the similarities end. This enjoyable, though occasionally sappy, picture by Christine Jeffs (Sylvia, Rain) is a long road trip away from the spiky double Oscar winner directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, but it provides a pleasant few hours in the agreeable company of Arkin, Amy Adams, and, the picture's brightest sunbeam by far, British actress Emily Blunt.
While Little Miss Sunshine dabbled in the world of troubled teens, suicidal yearnings, Proust and child talent contests, Sunshine Cleaning, as the title suggests, concerns itself with bleach-based products and rubber gloves, albeit in a rather specialised field.
Amy Adams plays Rose Lorkowski, formerly the brightest girl in high school, head cheerleader no less, whose life is now a far from merry round of family duty and hard work. Single mother Rose juggles looking after her lonely young son, elderly father (Arkin) and slacker sister (Blunt) with cleaning other people's homes.
In the words of the feminist sage Donna Summers, she works hard for the money, but there is not a lot of it to go round, and her only support, outside of her mostly unreliable family, comes from a married police detective whose idea of a romantic night out consists of an evening in a motel.
When Rose's policeman pal tells her of the big money to be made from cleaning up crime scenes she sees a way to get her son into a better school, and perhaps put her life back on track.
From vacuuming homes straight out of glossy magazines, Rose and her sister Norah are now confronted with the wonders of maggots, severed limbs, hideously stained mattresses, and other biohazardous materials. "Crime scene and trauma clean-up," says Rose when describing what she does to an old friend. "It's a real growth industry."
With the kooky premise established, the characters can get on with doing what characters do in indie comedy dramas: cracking wise while laying to rest the demons in their pasts.
With this task complete, the director then needs to send the audience out of the cinema on a high. Sounds easy, but the thudding failure of so many dramedies shows how hard it can be to do in practice.
Given the business it examines, it is hard to imagine how Sunshine Cleaning could be sentimental, but writer Megan Holley manages to make it so, much to the movie's occasional detriment.
When Adams, after cleaning up her first crime scene, describes how "we took all that stuff away and we made it better" she sounds like a cross between Snow White and Forrest Gump rather than someone who has just scraped gore from a wall.
When we eventually learn why these apparently capable, go-ahead women have achieved so little in life the explanation is just a little too neat to be credible.
With the screenplay seesawing between corniness and the telling of brutal truths, it is down to actors to find the right balance and tone. Arkin, as mentioned, has been here before in Little Miss Sunshine, for which he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
Adams, as those who recall her wonderful, Oscar-nominated performance in Junebug will know, can do bittersweet in the sweetest, most low-down of ways.
But it is Blunt's performance that turns out to be the real treat. So perky and deliciously vicious in The Devil Wears Prada, so regal yet coquettish in The Young Victoria, she brings real poignancy to the part of Norah, the younger sibling with a severe case of arrested development.
Besides the performances, there is another reason to recommend Sunshine Cleaning. Films like this used to be dubbed women's pictures. Now they are called, rather disparagingly, chick flicks, as though the largely female audiences for them were born yesterday and can't handle anything but the fluffiest of dramas. As if Transformers, teen gross-out comedies or the latest horror off the production line were prime examples of keeping it real.
The joy of multiplexes is that most audiences, and tastes, can be catered for. Sometimes you want to boldly go where a million Trekkies have gone before. Sometimes a look-away-now horror is just the ticket. And sometimes you just want to watch an old-fashioned, defiantly girly tale of blood stains, cleaning products, and bonding. Reality, like housework, can always wait.
