The team that produced the outsized indie hit Little Miss Sunshine has returned with another offbeat character study, Sunshine Cleaning. The film stars the currently red-hot Amy Adams and the versatile Emily Blunt ( pictured, star of the lesbian romance My Summer of Love and hysterically funny in The Devil Wears Prada ) . Adams and Blunt play Rose and Norah, two sisters who tentatively start a business cleaning up after violent crime scenes as a way to climb out of their unsatisfied lives.
The picture, based on a first-time script by Megan Holley and directed by Christine Jeffs ( who also helmed the biopic Sylvia ) , has an unhurried pace and the same sort of gentle-but-tough quality of other female-centered pictures like Friends with Money and Housekeeping. It's nicely observed, the characters feel true to life ( Holley has a telling eye ) and the performances are uniformly excellent. But somehow the picture never quite catches hold; it never really sinks in. This may have to do with the over-familiarity of the leading arc of the story which follows Rose, a typical struggling young single working mother. She's the earnest sister, the hard worker who has taken some hard knocks and who can't seem to let go of her involvement with her now-married high school sweetheart, a police detective ( Steve Zahn, a wonder as always ) . It's Rose who follows up on the detective's idea for her to start the business when she needs money to enroll her troubled young son in private school but it's her sister Norah, the ne'er do well, who is haunted by the crime scenes and can't separate herself emotionally from them.
Though Rose's story will tug at the heartstrings, it was the screwed-up Norah who resonated most with me. Norah is funny and brash but reveals enormous compassion when faced with the prospect of cleaning up the "crime scenes," which are more often than not the aftermath of suicides. One crime scene in particular haunts Norah and she tracks down the daughter ( Mary Lynn Rajskub ) of the victim, who thinks for a brief moment that Norah is interested in romance.
Rose and Norah themselves are both haunted by their own crime scene—the one they stepped into as little girls involving their mother. Like the sisters in Crimes of the Heart this incident has overshadowed their lives and set their relationship in stone—seemingly implacable Rose has become adept at picking up after emotionally messy Norah, but both are ticking time bombs. Alan Arkin plays their eccentric father ( a more benign version of the character he played in Little Miss Sunshine ) , who has passed his gambler's instinct for the sell onto his grandson.
Though Sunshine Cleaning lacks the dramatic punch of Alice Doesn't Live Her Anymore, the sweet daffiness of Waitress, the slapstick wackiness of In Her Shoes or the magic, ethereal quality of Housekeeping, it shares the same feminine spirit of empowerment embodied in these movies. And like them, it takes the time to let us into the lives of even its most minor characters. Even with such a familiar story arc, the characters in Sunshine Cleaning—both dead and alive—leave behind vivid memories when the movie's over.
In the Filipino language, the word Serbis means "service," and that's what the hustlers do to the male customers, cruising them in the rundown movie theatre owned by the Pineda family in Brillante Mendoza's enthralling film of the same title. The Pinedas, a ragtag bunch ruled with an iron fist by the matriarch "Nanay Flor" ( the marvelous Gina Pareno ) , are down to their last movie theatre and it's not much of a legacy. Beat-up and rundown—and showing a succession of squalid porn films—the movies are an excuse for the hustlers and their clientele to rendezvous on the second-floor balcony, just below the family's living quarters.
Set in the Filipino city of Angeles, Mendoza's film shows us a vivid portrait of a family seemingly involved in only its own problems, infected by the filth and enervation around them. The seedy environment has crept into the soul of the family; everyone seems tainted on some level by the ever-present sex acts around them, although they pointedly ignore them and don't make the connection. At one point the family's little boy is shown sporting red lipstick and pedaling a tricycle through the congregation of gay hustlers who go right on giving head to their customers as the kid goes by.
In Mendoza's nightmarish setting its always hot, steamy and noisy, and the camera often shoots from on high. Everyone seems like rats in a filthy, dark maze—especially when a goat wanders into the theatre, momentarily interrupting the sex acts taking place. You can feel the heat and smell the garbage and bad food in the place and—like the teenage son who has impregnated his girlfriend—you long for escape. The realistic but tragic solution the son comes up with, revealed at the fade-out, simply adds a large apostrophe to Mendoza's insightful film. The movie plays exclusively at Landmark Century Centre Cinema; www.landmarktheatres.com .
Department of shameless self-promotion: Attention all you roller disco/leg warmer/Olivia Newton-John/Gene Kelly/Michael Beck/Muse-loving queens! My alter ego, Dick O'Day, is hosting yet another edition of Camp Midnight, the film series dedicated to presenting "the best of the worst." I'm once again teaming up with David Cerda and his crew of Handbag Production players and the Music Box for a return engagement of Sing-Along Xanadu. The 1980 flick is one of the most fabulously hideous musical car wrecks in cinema history. We'll have a jam packed pre-show, complete with contests, surprise performances, prizes ( including a pair of tickets for Xanadu the Musical, now playing at Drury Lane Water Tower Place ) and more beginning at Midnight followed by the movie which will feature easy to follow along lyrics on the screen. Tickets, which include a interactive audience guide, are $12. www.musicboxtheatre.com
Check out my archived reviews at www.windycitytimes.com or www.knightatthemovies.com . Readers can leave feedback at the latter Web site.
