Stop me if you’ve heard this before. It remains astonishing that so many independent film-makers seem prepared to stick every bit as closely to genre templates as do the cigar-chewing directors of films starring giant lizards, robots or Adam Sandler.
The current exhibit is Sunshine Cleaning, but, for all the new ground it breaks, it might as well be called Juno Miss Sideways. As ever, much of the dialogue sounds as if it was composed by drawing lines randomly from early Talking Heads songs ("You have nice veins," somebody says). One character only has only one arm. All the others are in a permanent state of kook fever.
Goodness, I could hardly believe my eyes when the middle-class suburban mom turned out to be a fatuous, pampered boob. Next thing, you’ll be telling me Alan Arkin plays the eccentric grandfather. Oh, hello Grandpa Al. Pull up a chair.
That gripe re-acknowledged, it must be accepted that Sunshine Cleaningis a pretty amusing addition to the genre. The consistently charming Amy Adams (nervy, focused) and the impressively charged Emily Blunt (mad-eyed, clumsy) do great work as a pair of directionless sisters adrift in a baking Albuquerque that looks as if it has spent too many years at the wrong end of a sandblaster. The script is tight. The music, though every bit as strummy as expected, is surprisingly tolerable.
What goes on? The usual sort of thing. Single-mom Adams, who is having an affair with a married cop, and Blunt, who enjoys hanging from the bottom of railway bridges, set up a business that tidies the mess left at violent crime scenes after the police have removed the body. In their first weeks, they meet odd strangers, discover unhappy truths about one another and learn to tolerate their mad father.
At no point does anything happen that hasn’t happened in a dozen other films, but the cast radiates such degrees of charm that it fast becomes hard to mind.
You could do worse.
