sunshine cleaning [2008]

amy adams is a single mom with a wacked-out younger sister and a dad who happens to be alan arkin reprising the role of the dad/grandfather in an earlier, slightly quirkier, and better film, little miss sunshine [2006]. adams' character rose needs cash, enough of it to get her endearingly eccentric son out of public school and into a private one. what to do? simple. start a bio-hazard cleaning business and because this is an endearingly shallow yet sweet slice of life call the biz, sunshine cleaning.

there you have it. you don't have to endure the run length of this flick. i've done it for you. and i've lived to tell the tale. now, this is not a bad movie, at all. it is an unsatisfying little indie feature that throws metaphors like a young poet who has yet to read any poetry. there's the dead cb radio in the broken down van rose buys for her business that is used like an after-thought. first her son tries to talk to god with it. then apparently gives up because never does he use, or even is fascinated by the cb before or after his slight interrogation of the almighty. then rose uses it later to talk to her dead mother. and that's it.

there's also model helicopters picked up then set aside like a bored 5-year-old that symbolizes i don't know what but it seems that the filmmaker meant them to be some kind of portent. of what is never developed beyond a vague hint. so it goes. adams is a lovely creature. very lovely. in fact we get to see her in her knickers on at least three separate occasions. not that i'm complaining about seeing adams in her underwear only the filmmaker seems enamored of her too well and no one else appears in underthings even when other people, like the gifted steve zahn who plays a detective having an affair with rose, is in her bedroom when she is wearing nothing but bra and panties. if it seems i'm making too much of a barely clad adams it's because the director seemed to not know how to frame an intimate scene, whether it be with lovers or waking up in the morning alone in bed. in fact the whole of the picture is awkward as hell.

which is a shame for the movie is a good idea if it weren't so over-written and flabbily directed. the cast does well with what they are given. perhaps the director just graduated from film school and threw everything she knew into this film, the good and the obvious that is presumably taught in film school. the ending is a let down as if the director didn't know how to end it and just simply stopped in mid breath. maybe the director wanted to make a slice of life and life itself is often anti-climactic. perhaps. what i want from a movie of this sort is not necessarily closure but at least some kind of resolution. if the movie is to end on a still-drop then the flick must be built to that suddenness. not meander around it.

another undeveloped idea was the sister's sexuality and her relationship with another woman. it's picked up then dropped as quickly as the idea was announced. pity. since the sister definitely needed some kind of stability other than her more reliable older sister and slightly befuddled but wise old sage of a father. not that i should be ragging on this flick. i was disappointed by it but i liked it well enough. not to see again but the range of adams as expressed even in this limited film was a pleasure to behold. adams has a little of i don't know what that makes her immediately, at least to me, likable. her likability was barely enough to carry this film. as for the filmmaker, christine jeffs, who i just learned by clicking on her profile at imdb.com made the earlier biopic of the poet sylvia plath, and which i've not seen so can't comment on it, perhaps needs to make a few more films to hone her craft. as for her movie under review, well, as the late joe e. brown once said, nobody's perfect.