Thanks to a surprise date night ("Hey, Mom, wanna take the kids tonight?" "Okay, as long as you pick them up before I go to work tomorrow."), we went to see Sunshine Cleaning. I can't promise there won't be any spoilers, so if you don't want to risk it, don't read any further.
Still with me?
Okay, well, for just a bit of a plot summary...it's basically about a woman who works as a maid and needs a better income, so she starts a crime scene cleanup business with her sister.
The characters were nothing special. Rose, the main character, was the classic (and by "classic," I mean "cliché") super-responsible-single-mom type; her sister, Norah, was the even more classic totally-irresponsible-lives-with-her-dad-needs-to-be-taken-care-of-by-her-sister type. The supporting characters were also pretty cardboardy.
I think the premise of the movie was fine, and I even would have been okay with the not-terribly-original characters in it, but the movie's downfall was its desire to try to be about eight different things. It was about the plucky ex-cheerleader-now-maid who wants a better life. It was about two sisters who were raised by their father, in their mother's absence. It was about the unlikely friendship between two women who were brought together in a very unusual way. It was about a blossoming romance between a single mom and her business associate. It was about a man's wacky business ideas.
I could see what the movie was trying to do to pull all those stories together. I really wanted to like it, and was on board at the beginning of the film. But in the end, it was just too clumsy, and it didn't deliver. It felt discombobulated and unfinished. It just plain didn't work.
On the plus side, I have now seen two of the three quirky "Sunshine" movies out there. (Seen: Little Miss Sunshine and Sunshine Cleaning. Still to be seen: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.)
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