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Sunshine Cleaning

SUNSHINE CLEANING (Christine Jeffs). 92 minutes. Opens Friday (March 27). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NN


A quirky indie dramedy about quirky indie people doing quirky indie things, Sunshine Cleaning couldn’t be more calculated and prefabricated if the Sundance Lab were an actual laboratory.

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Amy Adams and Emily Blunt star as small-town sisters who learn a little something about life when they go into business cleaning up crime scenes: conflicted single mother Adams restores serenity to a chaotic world, while slutty fuck-up Blunt pratfalls onto grotty mattresses to gick out the audience.

The resemblance to that other recent crowd-pleasing indie about a dysfunctional family bonding over an unlikely task doesn’t end at the title. Megan Holley’s cut-and-paste screenplay also offers a pokey minivan, a precocious youngster and a spacey-granddad role tailor-made for Alan Arkin.

Even the incidental characters are overloaded with charming eccentricities, like Clifton Collins Jr.’s wistful cleaning supplies wholesaler. (He only has one arm! And likes to build model airplanes! That’s complex, right?)

The leads are too principled to fully buy into the condescending quirkery – particularly Blunt, who has some great moments opposite a brusque Mary-Lynn Rajskub as a woman who may not know her mother was one of Blunt’s cleanups – but they’re fighting a losing battle against director Christine Jeffs, who’s content to mechanically shove the action from one contrivance to the next.

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