Sunshine Cleaning and some other thoughts

April 15th, 2009 | By

Chief-

On the day that I went to see Sunshine Cleaning, I had this feeling that I couldn’t shake.  What is the meaning of success in one’s eyes? I went to see this film to lift my spirits.  Lately, I have been torn between my personal meaning of success and the conventional meaning of success.  I feel like it is difficult to tell myself that I am successful in my own eyes if people around me do not approve or agree. I want to say that it is all about how I see things, but we don’t live alone, do we? And what others define as success, especially those whom we’re close to, does affect our own view of success.  And, even though we ought to be happy for our own achievements, if people we consider ‘family and friends’ are not happy, it’s hard to celebrate alone.

There is a scene in Sunshine Cleaning that portrays this sentiment exactly, when Amy Adams’ character, Rose chooses to attend a baby shower of her old high school buddies over helping her sister Norah (Emily Blunt) with the biggest job her newly formed company could get.  Obviously, she chooses the baby shower and this leads to a severe setback in her newfound career. When she is confronted of her choice, I just wanted to show them that I was doing something with my life too (I paraphrase).

This is true, isn’t it?  We often want people in our lives to approve of our actions.  I wonder how long this feeling lasts?  I hope not much longer, as I am getting quite exhausted of faking my desire to do something different in order to conform to approvals.

So what is Sunshine Cleaning about?  It’s about a woman in her late twenties/early thirties Rose (Amy Adams) who used to be the cheerleader dating the quarterback, or maybe captain of the football team, Mac (Steve Zahn from Riding In Cars With Boys).  Now, she’s the same pretty girl, who cleans for Pretty Clean (think Molly Maid) and has an affair with the same man Mac, now a cop.  She has an eight year old imaginative son Oscar (the very cute Jason Spevack) who keeps getting in trouble at school, a father Joe (Alan Arkin) who keeps coming up with ‘get rich schemes’, and a new friend/admirer with one arm Winston (Clifton Collins Jr.).

One day she’s cleaning for a client, who happens to be an old high school classmate, and out of embarrassment she tells her that cleaning is temporary and she’s just gotten her real estate license.   Of course, this is a lie to save herself from looking like she failed in life.  Immediately, she speaks to Mac who suggests she switch to crime scene clean up to make more money.  But as the story continues, Rose’s problems keep piling up and you see a woman who tries so hard to change things for herself but keeps hiting stumps.

At the same time, you meet Rose’ sister Norah, who has been repressing her mother’s suicide for so long that she allows herself to be used and abused.  There’s a moment in the film when Norah reveals to a new friend Lynn (Mary Lynn Rajskub) how she pushes herself to do something thrilling in order to feel free, free from her feelings about her past and her present.  Although it looked quite liberating, that activity is not something I would ever consider do.

I liked this movie because it appealed to my life at that very moment.  And even though it didn’t have a very realistic ending, I feel like having a little ‘sunshine’, real or not, is always welcomed to lift the mood.

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