Sunshine Cleaning (2008)

A boy talks to God on a CB radio in a beat-up cleaning van. A sassy young woman with no job and fewer prospects is transported to ecstasy trestling under an urban train bridge. Her older sister struggles in low-paid jobs to survive and bring up her son. A loser father who never gives up and with a heart of gold. A gentle one-armed man sells cleaning agents and makes model planes. Contract cleaning the grisly detritus of messy deaths as a path to a life with purpose. Sunshine Cleaning is a simple film that transcends a modest premise if you look deeply enough and with empathy. A story of the mostly painful struggle of those living on the margins in the suburbs takes you gently, and without violence or sermonising, on a journey where you discover the emptiness of things, the value of family, and the pain and wistful joy of grief. To have the perspective that sees something worthwhile in this thoroughly decent film perhaps one needs to have actually faced failure, been on the outside, been a father, or faced the angst that can push someone to blow their head-off. Ask an adult child who has had the heart-broking job of emptying their dead parent’s home of the stuff that is left behind, of the pain of deciding what to keep and what to throw away, of a place full of memories stripped of the signposts that anchored them, of the shock realisation that the artifacts of a life are at bottom junk to be removed for the next occupant. In this movie we have an original screenplay and direction by relative newcomers, and from that perspective they have done well. The cast is engaging and modest, they assume their roles without affectation or histrionics. Amy Adams and Emily Blunt are the two sisters. Alan Arkin, who has a mortgage on such roles, is the father, and Jason Spevack is charming as his grandson. Clifton Collins Jr. is impressive as the local cleaning aids supplier. Christine Jeffs’ unassuming point and shoot direction leaves the story by Megan Holley to unfold through the characters. Not a great film but it remains in the memory as a bitter-sweet reminder of the transience of things, that a good life is not defined by the accumulation of possessions but by how honestly and bravely we tread the path fate has dealt us.