Sunshine Cleaning

  Once again I apologize (if anyone's reading) for being so late on this one too.  Not that Sunshine Cleaning deserves such lag!  In fact, it's quite the opposite.  I really enjoyed this movie for many reasons.  First would have to be the character development, particularly of the two leads, sisters Rose and Norah, brought to life by probably two of the best female actors working today, Amy Adams and Emily Blunt.  Throughout the film you become very attached to both characters and they are just a great screen pair.  Not to mention a movie with a fully developed, complex, and interesting treatment of women, which we don't see a lot.  Rose and Norah are very real, and are not simply spending the whole movie pining for a man to save themselves emotionally financially - in fact its the exact opposite in this movie.  As you all probably saw already in the trailer, they obviously take it into their own hands by starting the crime-scene clean-up business (which was a new and interesting industry and concept to explore).  

   Throughout Sunshine Cleaning there is a purveying sense of class disparity that is unfortunately becoming more and more relatable to most Americans (not that it didn't exist before our current crisis).  Not only does this film do a good job of subverting the buddy life journey/dramedy typically reserved for men by putting two fully realized female characters front and center, but they are also poor/working class women in a small, New Mexico town setting.  All three of these factors are in the forefront where they would be marginalized or not exist in some other movies.  Either way, this is no glorified notion of the romantic, Sarah Palin, small-town America - but instead the reality of poverty and a depressing sense of under-development are on full display as the setting of this movie.  Rose, as a working, single-mom is forced to go clean the houses of worthless, condescending housewives who simply married their way up the class latter.  The film pokes fun at these wealthy suburbanite women and their near perverted obsession with producing and raising children.  Anyways, that was a tangent, but I was just pointing out the many ways there is an implicit critique of class inequality and proscribed gender roles, that is not heavy-handed or unrealistic and works well with the story.

 

     While the film does tie things up nicely with Rose and Norah starting their Sunshine Cleaning business, their entrepreneurial adventure is not without its major set backs, and the film is hardly trite or conventional.  While you become very attached to the sisters and it feels good to see the success of their business, it would be a disservice to Sunshine Cleaning to simply boil it down to a happy story where anyone in America can make it by starting their own business.  I think the nature of the business, cleaning up the bloody messes produced by the grimy underside of New Mexico, is a new an interesting facet to be explored (as it is) in the movie.  Judgement is not passed on a wife who shoots her abusive husband.  How is it that cops and business owners could be so insensitive to a man blowing his brains out right in front of them?  Rose and Norah are so desperate and burdened by shitty, degrading jobs, unemployment and financial woes that they are willing to go clean rotting households full of blood, guts, and pieces of brain in order to escape from their circumstances.  In the process, they intervene into the lives of the people who lost someone they loved, sometimes for good or bad.  Also, on the surface, it is empowering to see a woman take control of her economic circumstances, and not just sacrifice her soul or brains to marry a prince charming to come save her.  

Anyways, I've drilled this point home too much.  Sunshine Cleaning is a great film, that is shot well, with a great story, an interesting concept, fully realized and developed characters played by superb actors, and an underlying theme of the class inequality in this country.  By making this about the lives and struggles of ordinary people in these trying times, Sunshine Cleaning is a movie that is both of and for the present, and the many people feeling the pinch experienced by Rose and her family.  I highly recommend it.