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Initially, the way-too-nicely titled Sunshine Cleaning appears to be headed in the wrong direction. For its first half, the film doesn't seem to care to develop its characters very well and it seems more interested in moving the plot along, and that's a fatal mistake in most genres, but even moreso in "dramedies"... thankfully, we see a shift right around the halfway point, and the film's characters and their personalities converge decently well with the story to make for a solid remainder of the production's running time. My feeling has always been that if a movie doesn't start out too well but eventually finds its footing, it's a lot more possible that I'll end up liking it as a whole than if the opposite happens (in fact, bad endings have very often ruined what I would've thought would be great movies had they concluded differently).
As sisters Rose and Norah, Amy Adams and Emily Blunt are a fine on-screen pair of siblings who get to explore their relationship once they start working jointly as crime scene cleaners. And yes, the fact that they so randomly take a job like that sounds pretty ridiculous, but the film handles the logistics of how they start on the job and portrays their clumsiness so well (and amusingly) that we totally buy it. While Sunshine Cleaning doesn't represent the best performance given by either of the two (Adams has Junebug and Doubt, while Blunt has The Devil Wears Prada and My Summer of Love), they're still in top form, and it's a delight to watch them here. All you need to add to that is Alan Arkin's grandfatherly charm, which is exactly what we get (and it's foolish to think that this isn't something the filmmakers were thinking of in choosing the first word of the film's awfully alluring title).
The film features a pretty dark subplot with a lot of potential. It involves Norah's interactions with Lynn, who is played by Mary Lynn Rajskub (you might remember her as the pageant assistant in, gasp, Little Miss Sunshine). There's a nice sense of awkwardness in this relationship and there's never a real solid sense of what's going on, which is a good thing, but the problem is that it just ends with the predictable scene in which one of them discovers what the other was hiding and gets pissed off and leaves, and nothing more happens after that in terms of the two of them. Maybe the filmmakers preferred to leave it at that so that they could give us the, um, "sunshiny" conclusion that the film has. Though the film itself offers catharsis, that subplot doesn't, which made for a bit of dissatisfaction on my end, but this is really just a minor complaint.
While Sunshine Cleaning can't even come close to achieving the greatness of the other dramedy it may be trying to reference with its title, with the New Mexico location, and with Alan Arkin's grandfatherly presence, it's still a pleasant enough movie-watching experience, definitely one that should be more easily appreciated on the small screen.
6/10
