Christine Jeffs (2008)
Rose and Norah Lorkowski, two thirtyish sisters living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, set up in business to spring clean houses where murders or suicides have taken place. (This seems to be known as the ‘crime scene clean-up’ business, even though suicide is no longer a crime anywhere in the US.) It pays better than normal house-cleaning (which is how single mother Rose supports herself and her eight-year-old son Oscar) or waitressing (the latest job that Norah’s lost). The sisters’ occupation is the film’s hook; it’s also serviceable, if obvious, as a metaphor – getting through the disorder and misery of living to make something better of it. (The tagline on the poster is ‘Life’s a messy business’.) Beyond its ‘offbeat’ big idea, Sunshine Cleaning, which came to notice at Sundance in 2008, is largely conventional. Its emotional scope and trajectory are obvious from the start, thanks especially to the generic, twinkly, sad-but-hopeful music by Michael Penn (Sean’s elder brother). At the end, each of the main characters we’ve come to care about – Rose and Norah, their father and Oscar – is shown in a moment of transition to a somewhat more promising way of life. Being upbeat in such a minor key doesn’t make this neat finale any less programmatic but the fact that we have come to care about the Lorkowski family is proof that the film is worthwhile. There are resemblances to Little Miss Sunshine (which is a better film): the most positive of these is a demonstration of the incredible range and richness of American screen acting talent. (It’s not quite an American monopoly in either case: Little Miss Sunshine had Toni Collette; Sunshine Cleaning has Emily Blunt.) The actors make the film more than watchable; they make the people they’re playing matter.
In fact, it’s a minor character, who becomes a friend of the family, who illustrates this best of all. Winston mans the counter at a hardware store; he has one arm and is into making model aeroplanes (that gives an idea of the thin wackiness of the script’s characterisations). When we first meet him, Winston is showing Rose and Norah the store’s range of cleaning fluids. If this were a British feature, the odds are that the actor playing him would be nudging the audience to observe and warm to Winston’s eccentricity – there would be an element of condescension in both the actor’s approach and the audience response that it encouraged. Clifton Collins Jr plays Winston with complete empathy – he immediately becomes likeable and intriguing. Collins didn’t register much for me as Perry Smith in Capote (the competition was admittedly fierce) but he gives a beautiful performance here. Something of the same integrity comes through in what Steve Zahn does as Mac, Rose’s high-school sweetheart and now a married man with whom she’s having a routinised affair (same time each week in the same motel room). Mac isn’t someone to admire but Zahn has the taste not to play him in a condemnatory spirit – he rather brilliantly manages to use his muscular bulk to make Mac seem a weaker person. In one of the houses the sisters clean, Norah finds some photographs that she thinks must be of the dead woman’s daughter. She sees the daughter, Lynn, on the street one day and follows her into the building where she works in a blood doning clinic. Mary Lynn Rajskub gives Lynn, who is gay and attracted to Norah, a stifled, angry neediness. Mac and Lynn disappear from the story and Winston is relatively ignored in the allocation of happy endings but these characters stay with you as much as the Lorkowskis.
Amy Adams needs to guard against getting stuck playing utterly nice people but at least here she has an opportunity to express the effort and strain that goes into seeming cheerful. Rose was a star cheerleader in high school; Adams has a natural freshness and enthusiasm that makes this easily believable but it’s edged with the tiredness of years of disappointment in the outside world – as well as a stubborn determination to keep going and start achieving. (I liked the absence of a that-explains-everything reason for Rose’s life not having worked out the way that she hoped and that others expected.) Adams’s unforced sincerity and sensitivity allow her to rise even to the challenge of Rose’s talking to her dead mother on CB in the van that she and Norah use for work. There’s a more believable and genuinely touching sequence, when the sisters arrive at the house where a suicide has just occurred. Rose offers to sit for a while with the just-widowed old lady, before her son-in-law arrives to take her to her daughter’s home. Rose and Mrs Davis (Lois Geary) sit silently, in cruelly hot sunshine. Adams has a lovely, funny moment when Norah gags at the stink of a house they’ve just entered and throws up, and Rose scolds her for adding to the cleaning up they have to do.
Compared with Adams, Emily Blunt is self-aware and there are times when she verges on turning Norah’s ditsiness into a routine but she has presence and comic style (she’s much better here than in The Devil Wears Prada). She and Adams match up very well as sisters, physically and emotionally. The girls’ father, Joe, always on the lookout for a get-rich-quick ‘business opportunity’, strikes up an eccentric partnership with Rose’s son Oscar, who’s between schools. Getting Alan Arkin for the role of Joe after Little Miss Sunshine was not original thinking but he’s awfully good – and it is in fact a very different part: Joe Lorkowski keeps most of what he’s feeling inside. Arkin’s acting looks marvellously simple nowadays. Jason Spevack gives Oscar a blend of wilfulness and good manners that’s very appealing, and he too is pleasingly natural.
The characters that don’t make sufficient impression in Sunshine Cleaning are the biohazardous houses themselves. Christine Jeffs doesn’t communicate the sense of vacation and the residue of a particular human existence that should be part of the texture and atmosphere of these places, along with the debris and insects, the bad smells and bloodstains: the ‘crime scenes’ are mostly played for physically discomfiting but predictable comedy. And while this may reflect the director’s limitations (although this film is a big improvement on Jeffs’s hopeless Sylvia (2003)), it also points to fundamental weaknesses in Megan Holley’s screenplay. We eventually learn that the sisters were traumatised as young girls by discovering their mother’s suicide at home. Even if we accept that no mention is made of this personal history at the point they get into their new line of work, it’s hard to believe that it ever becomes just a job to Rose and Norah. The plotting that generates the climax and resolution of the story is clumsily implausible. When she is contacted about a clean-up job by an insurance company, Rose is excited: she thinks it could be their big break. It’s incredible that she trusts the wildly unreliable Norah to get to work on this assignment unsupervised just so that Rose can attend the baby shower of a high-school friend, whose house she found herself cleaning at the start of the film. There’s no convincing reason for Rose’s accepting the invitation to the shower: it must be as obvious to her as it is to us that she’ll be despised by her drearily comfortable contemporaries. It’s an unmissable engagement only because Megan Holley can’t think of a better way of getting her screenplay into the home straight.
9 July 2009
