One Paragraph Review: Sunshine Cleaning

I can't call this a bad meal but it really wasn't anything to save in the recipe book. Sunshine Cleaning tells the story of a down-on-her luck young mother who gets into the business cleaning up crime scenes and dead bodies. There were a lot of "independent film" elements to the movie — indy sister, precocious and overly smart son, shopkeeper with one arm, Albuquerque, etc. — but I'm not sure the story wasn't anything you couldn't get from a good TV drama. And how many films can Alan Arkin play the quirky yet stable father? And how many of 'em have "Sunshine" in the title? This movie was basically an indie stew that just didn't taste that great in the end.

One Paragraph Review: Sunshine Cleaning

There are so many things to like about this movie that I don't really know where to start. I think what I liked most about the movie is that I felt like its true core is not obviously and directly shouted at or pointed to in scene after scene. The real core of the movie is somewhat elusive from the major plot points. The film shows its main characters (wonderfully executed by the trio of Amy Adams, Emily Blunt and Alan Arkin) going through their lives and various subplots at an amusing and engaging pace, but slowly the movie reveals that the whole shebang is really about a much deeper emotional struggle that they all share. The allusion to, and revelation of, this central emotional connection that drives everything that everybody does is quite beautifully executed. At times some of the scenes are a bit too unoriginally sappy, but for the most part the whole film strikes exactly the right tone for what it's conveying.