With its crotchety old grandpa, precocious youngster and busted van, Sunshine Cleaning is going to have a hard time fending off comparisons to Little Miss Sunshine. Throw in a little Alan Arkin, and it is an incredibly similar movie. But where Little Miss Sunshine had the oh-so-likable Greg Kinnear, this flick survives comparisons with the charming leads of Amy Adams and Emily Blunt.

Set in New Mexico (getting flashbacks yet?), Sunshine is the story of sisters Rose (Adams) and Norah (Blunt), who have never dealt with the suicide of their mother and are always at odds with each other. Norah would rather sleep til noon and smoke weed than make it to her waitressing gig, and Rose, the former Homecoming Queen, is a struggling single mom and maid who is having an affair with her now-cop high school sweetheart (Steve Zahn). When Rose needs some extra cash to stick her son in a private school, her boyfriend gives her the idea to get in the corpse cleaning business, which is supposedly lucrative. Arkin is their zany dad who's always on the prowl for get-rick-quick schemes.

Soon Rose is giving up cleaning the homes of her former cheerleading squad to whiz about town in an old veedub van (continue flashbacks) with Norah in tow to cheerily scrub blood out of showers. There's a small sideplot that never quite goes anywhere involving Norah and Mary Lynn Rajskub.

What Little Miss Sunshine had going for it was its cute plot and rich characters. While Sunshine Cleaning almost reaches those goals in this quiet dramedy, it more than makes up for it in its leading ladies. Adams radiates the screen, and makes the audience cheer for her down-but-not out character. My only qualm with her is that I wanted to know what happened that made her fade from queen to lowly maid. On that note, I read one reviewer state that he didn't buy that two such beautiful and smart ladies could have no careers or good men in their lives. Clearly, this dude hasn't seen the state of the economy or dating scene out there... No matter, Adams packs warmth and humor into every scene, and is always a delight to watch.

Blunt complements Adams with her not quite as tough as she thinks, eyerolling attitude and deadpan delivery. Arkin is a delight as usual, but he's fairly wasted in the same role as Little Miss Sunshine. Sunshine Cleaning is a cheery little film with beautiful costars. It may not be overly memorable, but it's definitely worth checking out to forget all the woes of the real world for a couple of hours.

--Darcie Duttweiler

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