I have to say, I have been thinking about this film almost constantly since I watched it last night. Never have I seen a film that I connected with so strongly, but yet felt so ambivalent towards at its conclusion. The characters were deep and flawed and interesting and expertly acted by Amy Adams and Emily Blunt with support from Alan Arkin and Mary Lynn Rajskub. It was quirky and unique and felt very real. Almost every scene completely drew me in. I loved the dark humor. I thought the mother's suicide and her appearance in the made for TV movie was perfectly revealed and used throughout the film. I felt these characters' loss and believed that they would still be so affected by this loss that it shaped everything about who they became as adults.So why did such a great premise, with dynamic engaging characters, fall flat? I can only guess that all the pieces were there, but that they were just assembled incorrectly. I think editing killed this movie. So many wonderful scenes were missing reflection or aftermath. The characters would go through these touching moments and then nothing. We wouldn't see how this experience affected them. We wouldn't see their response and how they changed from this moment and so, poof, the great scenes just disappeared from m
y mind. One example was when Emily Blunt's character went trestling with her (unmentioned) girlfriend Mary Lynn Rajskub. Emily Blunt had this great scene of pain and release under the train that was cross-cut with the revelation that her mother committed suicide when she was a child and that her and her sister found her dead in the bathtub. The problem with this scene is that she brings Mary Lynn with her to experience this moment with her, but we never see Mary Lynn again. We don't see her reaction to what Blunt is doing, we miss a great opportunity for them to confront each other and see what this cathartic release has done to Blunt. Has it helped her move on? Has it helped her to open up to a possible connection with Mary Lynn? Nothing. We get nothing. I don't know how to feel about this profound moment because I don't know how it affected the character at all. We don't get any follow up scenes to clue us in either.
I think another big flaw in the structure comes from how the story arcs play out. Amy Adams is definitely meant to be the lead of this film. We are supposed to want her to achieve her dreams and wind up in a better place. It is established pretty quickly that Adams wants a respectable job and a man to truly care about her. Her son's problems at school propel her into the crime scene clean-up profession and she really connects with the job and the people. She gets what she wants well before the film finishes. She builds a successful business, through this she finds the strength to leave the man who is having an affair with her, but will never leave his wife for her, and she has a realization that this job means something to her. She helps people and suddenly is fulfilled. She has achieved her objective. And right then the story takes a turn, Norah burns the house down that she tried to clean without her sister. For the remainder of the film we are much more concerned with Norah (Blunt) and her arc. It is about how she dealt with the loss of her mother and stepping out of her sisters shadow. How she could and could not do things without her sister in her life. Her sister had to take care of her because her mom was gone.
There is a great scene about the sisters coping with the loss of their mother and the responsibility they felt towards each other in the bathroom at her son's birthday party. It is followed by another fantastic scene where they finally see the made for TV movie with their mom, but after these scenes, we again get nothing. We are given absolutely no clues as to how this affects the characters and what they do next. How did this profound moment they have been waiting for all their life change them? I don't have a clue so why did they even put it in the movie? It felt so hacked together at the end. Nothing came together. All these beautiful set-ups with no pay-off. The end was just ambiguous in a completely detrimentally way to the characters and the story. I literally feel robbed. Never have I wanted a director's cut so badly. I desperately searched for some deleted scenes on the DVD and there was nothing.
After doing some research, I learned much of the Blunt/Rajskub storyline was cut. I guess it was a lesbian storyline that they just axed. Typical. But lesbian content aside, I really think Sunshine Cleaning was Norah's story. It became her story and how she overcomes the effect of her mother's suicide and her own irresponsibility that resulted from her always having her over-protective sister look after her. I think the relationship between her and that woman had a lot to do with her arc in her emotional recovery and to exclude it just made the movie feel hacked. We lost her recovery and in this we lost the emotional core of this film. This was almost one of my favorite films. It certainly contains some of my favorite scenes and characters, but in the end, it just fades into ambiguity and from my conscious.
