Longer Lasting, Brighter Shine 0 comments

By A.G. Harmon

Small films about suicide come along with more frequency than you’d expect. They’re often lesser efforts, without big studio involvement—quiet affairs with ensemble casts looking to make break-out performances. You can imagine the actors thinking: “They’ll take me seriously now.” Predictably, the stretching exercise has mixed results. Such a heavy subject tends to drink up all the light in a script, so that the effort becomes yet another scolding of some societal intransigence, or a drudge-march through staged histrionics, meant to showcase how well an actress cries.

A pleasant exception is Sunshine Cleaning, written by Megan Holley and directed by Christine Jeffs. What keeps the film from the excesses of the genre is its focus on people who, understandably marked by their past, nevertheless strive mightily to pull through the present. While acknowledging the rupture they’ve experienced, they know that the point is to cauterize it. The place must become a scar, not a wound, and the characters in the piece—with varying adeptness—set about the business of living while conducting a trade for the dead.

Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams) is a single mother with an odd young son who’s disruptive to his class. As is so often the case, the school’s answer to this crisis is to have him drugged. So Rose decides to send the boy to private school. Her problem is that she has no means to do so. With only a widowed, impractical father (Alan Arkin) as her support, and with only a maid service job as her income, she cannot pay the tuition. So she asks her old high school boyfriend (Steve Zahn), a married cop with whom she’s having an affair, to hook her up with a lucrative service that he’s learned about: cleaning up crime scenes, after the fact.

Faced with no other choices, Rose takes to the task. Many of the jobs to which she’s called are not so much crime scenes as accidents, suicides, or lonely people who die by themselves and go unnoticed until their deaths scream out. So Rose soon meets up with the expected unpleasantries of blood, viscera, and decay.

But she doesn’t face them alone, as she recruits her sister Norah (Emily Blunt) to help. Norah is directionless and emotional, a party girl bouncing from loser job to loser job, unable to stabilize herself due to the memory of a shattering event in her childhood. The more complex of the two characters, she is one of those pitiable souls whose fear of loss and death drives them into the frenzied charade of an unruly life, as if they could ward off heartbreak by pretending at heartlessness.

But the very circumstances of Rose’s new business pushes both characters into unavoidable contact both with the fissures that burst life’s seams, and with the dismayed faces of those who cannot avoid witnessing what we daily, insistently, forget: that this will all end. The fine courage of facing that memento mori, and helping others to face it, is met with admirable subtlety—none greater than a scene in which Rose consoles an old woman who has bravely met the crew at her house, sitting outside with the keys so that they can enter the door and clean up what is left of her love.

There’s a point to the common criticism such films receive. The charge is that these small quirky offerings try to resist genres so much that they wind up becoming one. The idea goes like this: pick something weird (hazmat cleaning services) and put a family at loose ends in the midst of it (single mother, brilliant misunderstood child, lovable quixotic father, oddball sister) and have the lot struggle through three different conflicts until they come out victorious on the other side.

All of this can be seen as a cynical ploy, a Hollywood condescension to what middle America will think interesting. But it’s healthy and often profitable to take a cynical view of cynicism itself, at its resolute determination to find sullied motives and conventional behavior. There are few works that aren’t reminiscent of others, and few ideas that don’t resonate with things already seen. But what distinguishes such a piece are the intangibles—the dynamics of characters, performances, even particular lines and stagings—so that the genuine emerges out of material that in parts is less than it is in confluence.

That, and a clarity of purpose that resounds with something experienced, but seldom stated. Sunshine Cleaning brings to the fore such a truth. For it is all too easy to become entranced by our tragedies, morbidly consumed by our griefs. Like a yawning pit, we can stare too long into the abyss, dizzy and fall headlong. The power of heartbreak is understandable, and healing is perhaps too strong a word for what one does afterwards. Such calamities change the way things are felt, seen, understood. People do not so much heal as they simply go on. Still, as Rose says, screwing up her courage to begin her task, “Somebody has to do this.”

And eventually, late or soon, so must we all.