Deaths and Entrances

Sunshine Cleaning is too neat, while The Edge of Love is stuffed with ideas.

by Sam Adams

HELLO SUNSHINE: Amy Adams (left) and Emily Blunt play sisters who start a crime scene clean up crew in Christine Jeffs' Sunshine Cleaning.

Mystifyingly buzzed-about at Sundance 2008, Christine Jeffs' Sunshine Cleaning is a serviceable but none-too-distinct take on the second-chance story. Amy Adams and Emily Blunt play Rose and Norah, sisters whose lives have driven them apart despite the fact that they still live in the town where they grew up. A former homecoming queen who now cleans her former classmates' homes for a living, Rose is a single mother slugging it out in the trenches. She still sleeps with her high school sweetheart (Steve Zahn), then a football captain and now a cop, but he's married to someone else.

Norah is a more overt mess, unable to hold down a job, her eyes rimmed in black. But they both need shaking up, an opportunity that arrives when Rose learns from her ex about the lucrative business of crime-scene cleanup. Before long, they're scrubbing brains off walls and figuring out how to cover the smell of rotting flesh.

There's material here for a fine dark comedy, but Jeffs, the New Zealand director whose previous films include Rain and the Plath biopic Sylvia, glosses over the surface. The movie is neat, which is the last thing a movie about cleaning up human waste should be. The sisters' job removing the detritus of death corresponds to a similar process in their lives: dealing with the childhood memory of finding their mother with her wrists slit in the bathtub.

The cast is filled out with the usual assortment of quirks: the girls' father (Alan Arkin), a perpetual schemer whose money-making ploys invariably go bust; Rose's son (Jason Spevack), whose habit of licking objects threatens to get him bounced into special ed classes unless she can come up with the money for private school; and a soft-spoken cleaning-supply clerk played by Clifton Collins Jr., with one arm digitally removed for extra oddity.

Jeffs does a fine job with her leads. Adams has been playing weightless flibbertigibbets for so long it's easy to forget her ability to embody working-class characters without a hint of condescension, and Blunt ably conveys the quivering center beneath her tough exterior. But the movie never gets around to having anything on its mind.

The Edge of Love, by contrast, is chockablock with ideas. Too many, in fact. They pop out all over, not fitting together, but often fascinating on their own. The film's subject matter is pro forma biopic, the story of the awkward threesome between Dylan Thomas (Matthew Rhys), his wife, Caitlin (Sienna Miller), and his childhood love, Vera Philips (Keira Knightley), mixed in with footage of Philips' husband (Cillian Murphy) in the carnage of World War II. But director John Maybury, who directed the loopy Francis Bacon bio Love Is the Devil, bathes the scenes in oozing light, turning the movie into a kind of period hallucination, midway between the theatrical tableau of Derek Jarman and the acidic flashbacks of Dennis Potter.

The world Maybury creates is captivating. As for what goes on within it, it's not always easy to tell. The script, by Sharman Macdonald, is full of witticisms that don't quite come off as such, and Knightley and Miller's Welsh and Irish accents, respectively, sometimes mangle their dialogue beyond all recognition. (The middling sound on the DVDs that were sent out in lieu of screening the movie for press probably didn't help either; things may be clearer in the theater.) But it seems clear that, despite the famous man of letters at its center, the movie's interests lie elsewhere. Even though he's the only genuine Welshman in the main cast, Rhys' Dylan Thomas is a caricature, lying drunk in puddles of piss on cobblestoned streets and scribbling out verse on crumpled sheets of paper by the bedside. The focus falls on the friendship between the women, which, despite a scene in which they climb naked into the same bath, seems fundamentally girlish. Shut off from the world, especially once Thomas and the women unwisely quit the city for the isolation of the countryside, they make their own place, hermetic and impenetrable. That goes for the movie, as well, which is wondrous and daft in equal measure.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Sunshine Cleaning | Directed by Christine Jeffs | An Overture Films release | Opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse

The Edge of Love | Recommended | Directed by John Maybury | A Capitol Films release | Opens Friday at Ritz Five