See It or Skip It: Sunshine Cleaning

Or should we call it “Little Miss Sunshine Cleaning”?

Produced by Peter Saraf and Marc Turtletaub, the team behind 2006’s wonderful and winning indie phenom Little Miss Sunshine, Sunshine Cleaning shares a great deal of that film’s DNA: an off-beat sensibility, a commitment to quirkiness and Alan Arkin as a crotchy patriarch. But what made Miss Sunshine so compelling was its ability to bring levity to life’s traumas.

Sunshine Cleaning wallows in them instead.

Sunshine Cleaning stars the irrepressibly adorable Amy Adams as Rose, a single mother who, once upon a time, was the most popular, hottest girl in school. A decade later, the former captain of the cheerleading team finds herself cleaning houses for a living, carrying on a torrid affair with her married football star high school ex-boyfriend (Steve Zahn) and barely able to scrape together a living for her and her mischievous son, Oscar (Jason Spevack).

When Oscar needs to be private schooled, Rose desperately persuades her slacker sister Norah (Emily Blunt, looking far too model-y for the role) to start a cleaning business specializing in crime scenes.

This is the moment when you’d expect the dark comedy to kick in.

But it never does.

The film is a sad, monotonous, self-indulgent slice of life that is totally unappealing. Adams can’t help but be captivating but Megan Holley’s script, her first effort, which was discovered at a writing competition, is a ball-and-chain dragging Adams under throughout the piece, as is the case with the rest of the cast. Zahn’s comedic wings are frustratingly clipped, Blunt is forced to vacillate between catatonic narcissism and weepy, angst-ridden whiner while Arkin is a caricature of a wacky father who’s constantly coming up with a new get-rich-quick scheme. Waka waka. Even the appearance of Mary-Lynn Rajskub fails to elevate the piece into something resembling a comedy.

Clifton Collins Jr. is perhaps the film’s saving grace as Winston, the one-armed cleaning supplies salesman who provides the movie’s emotional anchor in a quiet, understated, surprisingly sexy and charismatic performance.

Director Christine Jeffs (Sylvia) attacked the film with a moroseness that permeates the entire piece and it ends up being two hours of somber, grating, uninvolving filmmaking. An audience will eventually shut down if a film has no ebb and flow and Sunshine Cleaning does nothing but constantly ask, “Isn’t that awful?”

Yes. It is.

Skip it.

–Sasha Perl-Raver