Movie- Sunshine Cleaning

Sunshine Cleaning (2008) is not quite as funny as I was expecting...but it is a lot warmer and touching.

Starring Amy Adams and Emily Blunt as sisters who both find they need more money, they open a cleaning agency that specializes in cleaning up death and crime scenes. Now this is a real thing...I read an article in Playboy about this a couple of years ago, and they make a load of money...of course there is the downside...some of the scenes they come across are grisly and gruesome.

But the sisters have little experience and take care of the dirty places much as they would a regular house cleaning...they even dump a mattress that had a decomposing body on it in a dumpster, in one of the funniest scenes of the movie.

But it is the touching parts that make this movie run. In one scene where they go to take care of a suicide scene of an old man, they meet his widow on the front porch. The scene with Amy Adams and the old lady is one of that may go down in movie archives...as filled with the human spirit, the sadness and the way one person can help another for a few moments in time. I call that scene a classic already.

Amy Adams is wonderful, as she tries positive affirmations to get her through her days of loneliness. She has an on-going affair with a married man to try to fill that void, but it ultimately also plays out. Adams has a way of showing inner revelations on her face and with body language without saying a word.

Blunt is not quite Adams equal here, but she does a really nice job as the screw up sister, who just can't seem to find her place, her niche. Her loneliness projects also.

Nice supporting roles for Alan Arkin, Steve Zahn and Clifton Collins Jr. (who really reminds me of a co-worker, Sam in security, that it was scary).

The movie was not perfect, it overplayed some things and underplayed others. But what it got right it got SO right, that I could not hold any of those things against it. It was a pretty darn good film.