I Make Movie Review: "Sunshine Cleaning"

There's a film that comes out every late February or early March-I call it the crap-clearer. It's the one that, with a brave hand, boldly wipes from our faces the shit dropped down upon us by the soulless mechanical flocks of rom-coms and slash-em-ups. It's the film that lets us know, that, for this year at least, the worst is over.
Cue "Sunshine Cleaning".
In this tart, cannily constructed cream puff of a movie, Amy Adams and Emily Blunt play Rose and Norah, sisters who want to stop depending on Daddy (Alan Arkin) and strike out on their own-so what better way than to start a crime-scene cleanup business?
Sunshine. Alan Arkin. A fractured family.
Sound familiar, kiddies?
It is-a few surprises are too sparse to hide the fact that this production delves way too often and far too deeply into the paint-by-numbers cliches we've come to expect from just about everything labeled "low-budget indie comedy". But what sets this same-old same-old souffle apart is a spicier-than-usual key ingredient-the cast. Blunt and Adams are two of the most spectacular young talents around today, and they make a more convincing pair of movie siblings than anyone I can think of since Mia Farrow and co. bitched and bickered memorably in "Hannah and Her Sisters". No actress can win you over as fast and as decidedly as Adams, and even when the script fails to explain the motivation behind her every move (her affair with Steve Zahn's cop, for example), you can catch an umistakable glimpse of it in her eyes. Blunt's bitter shoe-gazer Norah gets (and commands) the spotlight in both the funniest (a bedtime story gone hysterically wrong) and most touching (a relevatory breakdown in the falling snow), and she holds your attention even when her character's dialogue leans toward the stereotypical. Even the bit players-Clifton Collins Jr. as a one-joke amputee, the always reliable Mary Lynn Rajskub as a straight-laced woman with whom Norah forms an unlikely, tragically fated friendship-trascend the tired tropes of the screenplay, evade the self-consciously "quirky" palette that confines the score, the photography, even the title fonts to a fey rip-off of so many lighter-than-air dramedies that have come before. Even as the final product sent chills of emotional emptiness up your spine, the extremely talented cast comes together and dodges the various potholes to provide the first honest movie laughs of 2009. So go see it. After all, in a season of downs, a film in which even a part of the whole is so well developed deserves a look. B