Catch “Sunshine Cleaning” if You Can

Independent films with limited releases often play at the Fargo Theatre and periodically show up in Fargo multiplexes, but rarely make it to Grand Forks/East Grand Forks. The off-beat “Sunshine Cleaning” premiered at Sundance in January 2008, played at various other festivals last year, and finally got a theatrical distribution two months ago, opening in only four theatres nationwide and gradually expanding to 642. Despite dropping back to only 471 screens last week, two of them, amazingly, were in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks. Less surprisingly, it’s also been playing in Fargo.

If “Sunshine Cleaning” manages to stay around another week or so before the pre-summer Hollywood blockbusters push it out of theatres, it’s an exceptional opportunity to go out to a movie that focuses on characters and ideas rather than action and special effects. New Zealand-born director Christine Jeffs shot screenwriter Megan Holley’s touching story of a dysfunctional but loving working-class family on location in New Mexico.

Three of the film’s producers also helped produce “Little Miss Sunshine,” and actors Alan Arkin and Mary Lynn Rajskub appear in both films, but the plots of the two dark comedies have nothing to do with each other. Whereas “Little Miss Sunshine” is an often outrageously satiric roadtrip comedy about individuality with deeply dramatic touches, “Sunshine Cleaning” is a tender and sad portrait of individuality and the daily struggle to survive, with frequent ironic and darkly comic touches.

Amy Adams and Emily Blunt play two very different sisters. Rose (Adams) is a one-time high school beauty queen who is now a single mom struggling to make ends meet working for a maid service, all while carrying on a long-time love affair with high school sweetheart Mac (Steve Zahn), who now happens to be a happily married police officer. Norah (Blunt) is a free-spirited but troubled party girl who works minimum wage jobs until she’s fired and lives with their ne’er-do-well father Joe (Arkin), whose get-rich-quick schemes never seem to pan out.

Mac mentions to Rose that with her cleaning experience, she should consider the lucrative crime-scene and death-scene cleanup business. When Rose’s bright but troubled son Oscar (Jason Spevack) is threatened with expulsion from public school, she convinces her sister Norah to help her start up Sunshine Cleaning so they can raise money for a private school that can give Oscar the attention he needs.

The rest of the film maintains a delicate balance of comedy and drama as Rose and Norah try to adjust to the distasteful duties of cleaning up after murders and suicides and learning on the job—at first after the fact—of official biohazard regulations. Both discover a strange sort of bonding with the people whose homes and lives they are briefly a part of, feeling somewhat guilty for discarding personal mementos without trying to contact relatives.

Norah is openly brash but inwardly the more sensitive of the two sisters, and impulsively tries to locate the daughter (Mary Lynn Rajskub) of one of the suicides they’ve handled, gradually building an odd and tentative relationship with her. Rose, meanwhile, has become interested in the one-armed cleaning supply dealer (Clifton Collins, Jr.) who has discreetly been advising them on professional procedures so they will not get into trouble as the clueless amateurs they are at first.

The film does an effective job of hinting at various elements in characters’ pasts before finally revealing information that both gives stronger emotional resonance and explains key motivation for the characters, aided by the excellent ensemble cast. While often downbeat, and seeming to become more so as it progresses, the story is able to come to an upbeat conclusion that fits its characters and does not seem artificially tagged-on.

“Sunshine Cleaning” is thoughtful, moving, funny, and entertaining, a decidedly unusual alternative to find in a film playing at a mainstream multiplex.