Review of Sunshine Cleaning (2008) by Averyc — 21 Sep 2009

Adams and Blunt are pretty and decent. Arkin is annoying, as always. This movie is tepid and bland like 'Little Miss Sunshine'. Just because something is slow and not about affluent people in NYC or Los Angeles does not make it deep, profound, or moving.

Watching this film is like hanging out with boring people in a Starbucks. These slow and/or contemplative films are terrific: Solaris, Before Sunset, L'Avventura, Away From Her, Exotica, The Graduate, Scene From a Marriage.

Those are great films. Those films are, by and large, about interesting people going through dark hours. 'Sunshine Cleaning' is about boring people going through tough times. Absolutely nothing interesting was done with the characters' proximity to death.

That constitutes a huge failure of narrative and psychological imagination. If I sound pissy, it's because I resent when tedium and vapidity masquerade as depth. That excerpt from Rosenblatt's Austin Chronicle review is dead on.