Sunshine Cleaners - The Review
As part of my desire to write more, the creeping realization that bitching about my job is growing tedious even to me and a sense of nostalgia for my time at the Technique, I’ve decided to take up writing movie reviews again. Hopefully, this won’t be one of those things I decide to do, do once and then completely forget about, leaving the one post referencing it behind as a permanent reminder of my own flakiness, but who knows?
Anyway, I just watched Sunshine Cleaning, the new film from Christine Jeffs, whose most notable previous film would probably have to be Sylvia, the 2003 biopic about Sylvia Plath, which I’m pretty sure I once rented but then never got around to watching. Sunshine Cleaning starring Amy Adams, Emily Blunt and Alan Arkin is being pimped as the spiritual successor to Little Miss Sunshine, a film whose brass ring is clearly being reached for with vigor and is, for the most part, grasped.
Cleaning is a thoroughly enjoyable film, but it lacks a certain something when it comes to original vision, and since I’ve been pissing and moaning at myself for the past few months about how unoriginal and boring I am, such a heinous crime could not possibly go unanswered in the media I choose to write about on a blog nobody reads. The basic problem here is that it seems like yet another one of those movies, featuring many of the usual darlings of independent cinema, covering topics and themes that tend to crop up over and over again in a certain type of film in which Sunshine Cleaning happily categorizes itself.
This is not to say that it isn’t a success of the form. Like The Breakfast Club for ‘80s teen movies or Animal House for immature titty comedies, Sunshine Cleaners shines brightly amongst the undifferentiated, repetitive dross that composes the mid-fi, trying-to-maintains-its-popular-sensibilities, learn-to-love-yourself-in-a-fucked-up-world indie flicks. It’s not bad. In fact, it’s rather good, but it’s certainly been done.
Amy Adams play Rose Lorkowski, former queen of high school now reduced to working for a maid service to make ends meet and waiting for married cop Mac (Steve Zahn) to come around her way in a more permanent fashion than charge-by-the-hour motel rooms. Her sister, played by Emily Blunt, is pretty much the girl from Pieces of April. She’s a big ol’ lovable screw up who gets fired from her job within her first five minutes of screen time. Alan Arkin reprises his role as the irascible old coot from Little Miss Sunshine and Rose’s adorably weird and precocious son is played by one Jason Spevack.
Rose, in need of a better and less embarrassing cash-flow solution, enters into the crime-scene cleanup business with little else but a smile and a can-do attitude. She quickly recruits her sister to help out, and things just kind of go from there.
One of my only real beefs with the movie would be its lack of any sort of driving conflict. Sure Rose needs money, and sure there’s the obligatory tension between the all together, gets shit done sister and the flaky, sleeps in on Mondays one, but frankly everything just kind of clicks along quite nicely for everyone for most of the movie. It doesn’t even feel like anything meaningfully disruptive happens until at least two-thirds of the way into the story, and even that is handled rather quickly and without much bother. There’s not really a whole lot of doubt in how this whole thing will be playing out.
Though, in fairness, the film does throw a few curve balls in the b-stories, which is particularly nice considering that all these children-of-Garden State indie flicks have a tendency to play out like morality plays with everything wrapping up nicely in the end. It was good, in a genre notable for its insistence that, yes, the world is a fucked up place, for a film to keep some things actually fucked in the end (and not in a cute, harmless way).
In the end, Sunshine Cleaning was a well-executed, quite enjoyable little movie that you’ve already seen by three or for other names. And while that’s not the worst thing in the world, it does kind of make one question the point of independent cinema if it’s just going to evolve its own set of well-travelled tropes and cliches to use rather than making a sincere attempt at creating a fresh new vision. Again, the unoriginality factor is hardly a deal breaker, it’s just a little disappointing is all.
Anyway, I just watched Sunshine Cleaning, the new film from Christine Jeffs, whose most notable previous film would probably have to be Sylvia, the 2003 biopic about Sylvia Plath, which I’m pretty sure I once rented but then never got around to watching. Sunshine Cleaning starring Amy Adams, Emily Blunt and Alan Arkin is being pimped as the spiritual successor to Little Miss Sunshine, a film whose brass ring is clearly being reached for with vigor and is, for the most part, grasped.
Cleaning is a thoroughly enjoyable film, but it lacks a certain something when it comes to original vision, and since I’ve been pissing and moaning at myself for the past few months about how unoriginal and boring I am, such a heinous crime could not possibly go unanswered in the media I choose to write about on a blog nobody reads. The basic problem here is that it seems like yet another one of those movies, featuring many of the usual darlings of independent cinema, covering topics and themes that tend to crop up over and over again in a certain type of film in which Sunshine Cleaning happily categorizes itself.
This is not to say that it isn’t a success of the form. Like The Breakfast Club for ‘80s teen movies or Animal House for immature titty comedies, Sunshine Cleaners shines brightly amongst the undifferentiated, repetitive dross that composes the mid-fi, trying-to-maintains-its-popular-sensibilities, learn-to-love-yourself-in-a-fucked-up-world indie flicks. It’s not bad. In fact, it’s rather good, but it’s certainly been done.
Amy Adams play Rose Lorkowski, former queen of high school now reduced to working for a maid service to make ends meet and waiting for married cop Mac (Steve Zahn) to come around her way in a more permanent fashion than charge-by-the-hour motel rooms. Her sister, played by Emily Blunt, is pretty much the girl from Pieces of April. She’s a big ol’ lovable screw up who gets fired from her job within her first five minutes of screen time. Alan Arkin reprises his role as the irascible old coot from Little Miss Sunshine and Rose’s adorably weird and precocious son is played by one Jason Spevack.
Rose, in need of a better and less embarrassing cash-flow solution, enters into the crime-scene cleanup business with little else but a smile and a can-do attitude. She quickly recruits her sister to help out, and things just kind of go from there.
One of my only real beefs with the movie would be its lack of any sort of driving conflict. Sure Rose needs money, and sure there’s the obligatory tension between the all together, gets shit done sister and the flaky, sleeps in on Mondays one, but frankly everything just kind of clicks along quite nicely for everyone for most of the movie. It doesn’t even feel like anything meaningfully disruptive happens until at least two-thirds of the way into the story, and even that is handled rather quickly and without much bother. There’s not really a whole lot of doubt in how this whole thing will be playing out.
Though, in fairness, the film does throw a few curve balls in the b-stories, which is particularly nice considering that all these children-of-Garden State indie flicks have a tendency to play out like morality plays with everything wrapping up nicely in the end. It was good, in a genre notable for its insistence that, yes, the world is a fucked up place, for a film to keep some things actually fucked in the end (and not in a cute, harmless way).
In the end, Sunshine Cleaning was a well-executed, quite enjoyable little movie that you’ve already seen by three or for other names. And while that’s not the worst thing in the world, it does kind of make one question the point of independent cinema if it’s just going to evolve its own set of well-travelled tropes and cliches to use rather than making a sincere attempt at creating a fresh new vision. Again, the unoriginality factor is hardly a deal breaker, it’s just a little disappointing is all.