Word: rosee
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...affirmation-hungry Hallmark set often takes a beating at the art house. But Sunshine Cleaning, directed by Christine Jeffs, doesn't mock Rose, a former popularity queen and high school cheerleader turned single mom supporting herself as a cleaning lady. It shares her secrets, reveals her weaknesses and then steps back and allows her to look for that strength and power...
...Because she's desperate for money (her challenging son Oscar, played by Jason Spevack, needs to go to private school), Rose gets into the more lucrative end of the cleaning business: tidying up suicides and sponging up blood and guts at crime scenes, a plot apparently inspired by an NPR story. She takes as her partner her sister Norah (Emily Blunt), a young woman who has so consistently screwed up that she's practically paralyzed...
...self-conscious quirkiness of a career cleaning up corpses could present a trap, but Jeffs (best known for the Plath biopic Sylvia) does her best to steer around it. Rose and Norah have one nose-holding, cringing, slapstick-filled scene in a dead woman's house, but a sense of respect for the departed pervades the movie. "Do you think they loved each other?" Norah asks, surveying the bathroom where a murder-suicide took place. "Yes," Rose says with certainty. The more we learn about Rose and Norah's childhood - their mother died in what Norah dryly terms...
...some nice supporting work by Zahn, who gets a rare chance to be sexy as that weak-willed adulterer. Clifton Collins Jr. makes an appealingly laconic one-armed shopkeeper and 24's Mary Lynn Rajskub earns every second of her screen time playing the estranged daughter of one of Rose and Norah's "clients...
...didn't share a title word, Sunshine Cleaning would likely be compared to Little Miss Sunshine, which came from the same production company. There's the dark humor, the pathos, the suicide theme, the misfit child everyone adores and last but not least, Alan Arkin, who plays Rose and Norah's father Joe. Take away Little Miss's grandpa's deep interest in pornography, and they are essentially the same characters. Arkin's needling charms are intact, but it's a poor casting choice. When you hear him giving the same self-esteem speech to Oscar that he gave...