DRAMA
Sunshine Cleaning (15)
3/5
IN A NUTSHELL
Two down-on-their-luck sisters set up a crime scene clean-up business and find there's more to life than stubborn splatter patterns.
REVIEW
Mattresses. They contain untold horrors - and that's at the best of times when they're just soft shelves for sleeping.
Come the icky moment when some mope self-destructs under the duvet and their essences drain via the nearest exit, they become a universe of humming, vivid mortality. At that point, who you gonna call? Sunshine Cleaning.
Sunshine Cleaning is not a popcorn movie. It may be many things - grimly life affirming, moving, way out wacky - but not that. The consumption of fluids and sweetmeats is best done before the first blood spatter is teased out of the first floorboard with the first toothbrush.
It is down here, amid the gunge and grime and bloody offcuts from shattered lives that we find two sisters, down on their luck and out of cash but, unlike their customer base, not about to give up the ghost.
The more sensible and focussed of the two is Rose Lorkowski (a winning Amy Adams) who wants better things for her bright but wayward son.
With a humiliating Mrs Mop job and a car crash affair with a married detective on her CV, she knows the value of degradation. But, come the crunch, she sees there's more money cleaning up after messy deaths than snooty ex-school pals and two-timing humps.
She calls on sister Norah (a flinty Emily Blunt) to join the enterprise although, in the screw-up stakes, Norah is keen to show who's boss.
These sisters are doing it for themselves, and while they don't exactly storm the barricades they do fumble towards a sense of self-worth of sorts aided by genial if cranky dad (Alan Arkin) and the one-armed man in the detergent shop (Clifton Collins Jr).
Think Thelma and Louise in malodorous overalls.
Sunshine Cleaning is from the same solar system (and lexicon) as Little Miss Sunshine, but this is an altogether darker affair, with the oddballs and quirks seemingly tacked on as an afterthought to up the Indie on a scrappy tale of two plucky sisters who refuse to take it lying down.
And, while this little movie too often bails out early on good ideas, there's no doubting the touching sincerity of Adams and Blunt who act with their hearts on their sleeves (and another in a bucket).
