Jonathan Poritsky

A solid if uno­rig­i­nal indie flick with mov­ing per­for­mances and a tight, quirky script is what I had hoped to see at the movies. Instead, I saw Sunshine Cleaning, which plays like an idea try­ing des­per­ately hard to find a story.

The film fol­lows Rose Lorkowski, played by Amy Adams, a down on her luck sin­gle mother in Albuquerque who makes ends meat by clean­ing houses. Rose’s sis­ter, Norah, is a for­mer punk-kid who never grew up, can’t hold down a job, and lives with their idio­syn­cratic father, played with respectable charm by Alan Arkin. When Rose’s police offi­cer boyfriend, who is mar­ried, tells her how much money there is to be made in clean­ing up messy crime scenes, a light­bulb goes off and the tiny glint of a plot begins to form. Of course, the two sis­ters start a busi­ness clean­ing up crime scenes while deal­ing with their own emo­tional hangups.