The Thousands

Sunshine Cleaning made its debut at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, and the trailer makes it look very ‘Sundance’, know wam sayin’? Uplifting indie soundtrack; cutesy bickering and wise-cracking between family members; poignant moments of revelation.

Luckily, I hadn’t seen the trailer before I saw the movie, or I would’ve waddled into the cinema under the weight of my own cynicism. As it turns out, Sunshine Cleaning is refreshingly unsentimental about family and everyday dignity. Amy Adams is perfect as protagonist Rose Lorkowski – her sunniness resists irony yet doesn’t cloy either. As her no-good sister Norah, Emily Blunt provides snark sweetened with compassion.**Once a high school queen bee, Rose is now a single mum working as a house cleaner. She’s having an affair with a married cop (Steve Zahn), who words her up on the lucrative crime-scene cleanup business. Enlisting a reluctant Norah, Rose learns the job by trial and error, with the occasional help of enigmatic, one-armed cleaning supplies seller Winston (Clifton Collins Jr). Gradually, the sisters learn to tidy their own traumatic past. As Rose says, "We took all that stuff away, and we made it better."