Sunshine Cleaning

There are film you remember because they were good all the way through. Then there are films you forget about because they were good only in places. Sunshine Cleaning gets by on its good looks, but it's a film that will fall through the cracks.
Amy Adams and Emily Blunt get the good lines and developed characters in Christine Jeffs' Sunshine Cleaning, a fuzzy follow-up to her more intimate Sylvia from a few years back. The misleading advertising mentions Little Miss Sunshine because three of the four film's producers were associated with that chipper tale. If I was handling the ads for Sunshine Cleaning it would be linked to film's like Curdled (a 1996 film that continues the character of the taxi driving Gabriela from Pulp Fiction) that deal with people obsessed with violent crime who become cleanup engineers (they mop up blood).
Only Amy Adams (Rose Lorkowski) and her constantly out-of-work sister Emily Blunt (Norah) don't get into postmortem cleanup due to curiosity so much as because they're broke. The usual movie cliches abound; single mom needs money for private school, sis find a box of photos that she sits on the bed thumbing through.
Supporting characters are built up but then portrayed as eccentric rather than etched nicely like Adams ad Blunt. For instance Steven Zahn (miscast) was Rose's high school boyfriend who's having a affair with her; Alan Arkin plays their father who has scenes that depict his eccentricity (he buys a tub full of shrimp hoping to sell them to restaurants below price); while Mary Lynn Rajskub and Clifton Collins Jr. actually look like they might bring the film full circle as romantic interests to Rose and Norah only be rendered as cyphers.
Sunshine Cleaning sticks with me because of the scene where Norah's cleaning up a house where a person's died and the candle she' lit in a fit of peace catches the place on fire because Norah has run after a kitty who bolted outside. There's also the disturbing notion that chocolate flavored pooh is served at baby showers. Director Jeffs want to establish a dark comic mood with an opening scene that depicts a suicide in a gun store. But the characters just aren't that dark, so the movie often seems at odds with its tone.