YOU WOULDN’T THINK scrubbing a blood-stained bathroom with a toothbrush could signify hope or change, but for single mother Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams) it’s a ticket out of her current cash-strapped life.
Once the head cheerleader, quarterback’s girlfriend and envy of her high school clique, Rose works as a maid and meets said quarterback (Steve Zahn), now a married policeman, for motel quickies behind his wife’s back. Desperate to pay for her seven-year-old son to attend private school after he gets expelled, again, she ropes sister Norah (Emily Blunt), who’s just been fired, again, into starting a crime scene clean-up business.
At first glance, using a trauma cleaning business as a pivotal plot device smacks slightly of trying to be as quirky as possible. But rather than sitting down with the phone book and saying, "Right, what weird job can I give the Lorkowskis?" it seems scriptwriter Megan Holley got the idea for Sunshine Cleaning from a news piece about a crime scene cleaning crew. Even if she didn’t, most people won’t have given too much consideration to who mops up the scene of a murder or suicide after the CSI types have gone, and it proves both grim and interesting, though the gruesome side of things is kept to a minimum - we see just enough to understand their line of work, though not quite enough to get an idea of how traumatic it would actually be if you didn’t quickly become desensitised. At least it’s vaguely realistic, as we learn that trauma cleaners need proper training and certification (would-be entrepeneurs, take note).
The cleaning business provides the foundation for some particularly poignant moments - a scene with a devastated pensioner whose husband has committed suicide, for example - and some physical comedy that works because it doesn’t try too hard. Indeed, that’s one of Sunshine Cleaning’s virtues. It’s genuinely amusing, because Holley succeeds at giving her characters inherently funny things to say and do, rather than trying to make them do or say unfunny things in a humorous way (a simple enough distinction, but one that too many people fail to make).

LET’s GET THE Little Miss Sunshine comparisons out of the way: the two films share the same producers and the same location, New Mexico. Both have a battered van and Alan Arkin as grandad to a cute, precocious kid, plus an obvious similarity in titles. But it would be doing Sunshine Cleaning an injustice to simply tick boxes against Little Miss Sunshine, because it’s an enjoyable and absorbing movie on its own merits, with much to commend it.
While Arkin, as ever, is great value, the film’s key draw is the double act of Amy Adams and Emily Blunt as sisters Rose and Norah. They’re well-suited to their roles; in fact, they’re both playing very much to type. Adams attracts perenially sweet parts, while Blunt tends to get the edgier fare, and so it is here. But while Norah (Blunt) initially seems pointlessly rebellious and irresponsible, losing her job because she sleeps through her shift and telling her nephew Oscar nightmare-inducing stories about ‘Lobster Man’, it soon becomes apparent that there’s more to her than there might first seem. She’s the one who keeps a box of their mother’s things, including cigarette butts, in a desperate attempt to feel close to her, and it’s also Norah who tries to trace the relative of a woman whose squalid, infested flat they clean after she commits suicide.
Sunshine Cleaning shares the same warm, offbeat tone that made Little Miss Sunshine such a success. And while it may sound like Little Miss Sunshine’s poor relative, or Sundance by-the-numbers, it’s an enjoyable, poignant, moving and - yes - funny film in its own right.