Daily Archives: Friday, September 11, 2015

  • Sunshine Cleaning

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Christine Jeffs (2008)

    Rose and Norah Lorkowski, two thirtyish sisters living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, set up in business to spring clean houses where murders or suicides have taken place.  (This seems to be known as the ‘crime scene clean-up’ business, even though suicide is no longer a crime anywhere in the US.)  It pays better than normal house-cleaning (which is how single mother Rose supports herself and her eight-year-old son Oscar) or waitressing (the latest job that Norah’s lost).  The sisters’ occupation is the film’s hook; it’s also serviceable, if obvious, as a metaphor – getting through the disorder and misery of living to make something better of it.  (The tagline on the poster is ‘Life’s a messy business’.)  Beyond its ‘offbeat’ big idea, Sunshine Cleaning, which came to notice at Sundance in 2008, is largely conventional.  Its emotional scope and trajectory are obvious from the start, thanks especially to the generic, twinkly, sad-but-hopeful music by Michael Penn (Sean’s elder brother).  At the end, each of the main characters we’ve come to care about – Rose and Norah, their father and Oscar – is shown in a moment of transition to a somewhat more promising way of life.  Being upbeat in such a minor key doesn’t make this neat finale any less programmatic but the fact that we have come to care about the Lorkowski family is proof that the film is worthwhile.   There are resemblances to Little Miss Sunshine (which is a better film):  the most positive of these is a demonstration of the incredible range and richness of American screen acting talent.  (It’s not quite an American monopoly in either case:  Little Miss Sunshine had Toni Collette; Sunshine Cleaning has Emily Blunt.)  The actors make the film more than watchable; they make the people they’re playing matter.

    In fact, it’s a minor character, who becomes a friend of the family, who illustrates this best of all.  Winston mans the counter at a hardware store; he has one arm and is into making model aeroplanes (that gives an idea of the thin wackiness of the script’s characterisations).  When we first meet him, Winston is showing Rose and Norah the store’s range of cleaning fluids.  If this were a British feature, the odds are that the actor playing him would be nudging the audience to observe and warm to Winston’s eccentricity – there would be an element of condescension in both the actor’s approach and the audience response that it encouraged.  Clifton Collins Jr plays Winston with complete empathy – he immediately becomes likeable and intriguing.  Collins didn’t register much for me as Perry Smith in Capote (the competition was admittedly fierce) but he gives a beautiful performance here.  Something of the same integrity comes through in what Steve Zahn does as Mac, Rose’s high-school sweetheart and now a married man with whom she’s having a routinised affair (same time each week in the same motel room).   Mac isn’t someone to admire but Zahn has the taste not to play him in a condemnatory spirit – he rather brilliantly manages to use his muscular bulk to make Mac seem a weaker person.  In one of the houses the sisters clean, Norah finds some photographs that she thinks must be of the dead woman’s daughter.   She sees the daughter, Lynn, on the street one day and follows her into the building where she works in a blood doning clinic.  Mary Lynn Rajskub gives Lynn, who is gay and attracted to Norah, a stifled, angry neediness.   Mac and Lynn disappear from the story and Winston is relatively ignored in the allocation of happy endings but these characters stay with you as much as the Lorkowskis.

    Amy Adams needs to guard against getting stuck playing utterly nice people but at least here she has an opportunity to express the effort and strain that goes into seeming cheerful.  Rose was a star cheerleader in high school; Adams has a natural freshness and enthusiasm that makes this easily believable but it’s edged with the tiredness of years of disappointment in the outside world – as well as a stubborn determination to keep going and start achieving.  (I liked the absence of a that-explains-everything reason for Rose’s life not having worked out the way that she hoped and that others expected.)   Adams’s unforced sincerity and sensitivity allow her to rise even to the challenge of Rose’s talking to her dead mother on CB in the van that she and Norah use for work.  There’s a more believable and genuinely touching sequence, when the sisters arrive at the house where a suicide has just occurred.  Rose offers to sit for a while with the just-widowed old lady, before her son-in-law arrives to take her to her daughter’s home.  Rose and Mrs Davis (Lois Geary) sit silently, in cruelly hot sunshine.  Adams has a lovely, funny moment when Norah gags at the stink of a house they’ve just entered and throws up, and Rose scolds her for adding to the cleaning up they have to do.

    Compared with Adams, Emily Blunt is self-aware and there are times when she verges on turning Norah’s ditsiness into a routine but she has presence and comic style (she’s much better here than in The Devil Wears Prada).  She and Adams match up very well as sisters, physically and emotionally.   The girls’ father, Joe, always on the lookout for a get-rich-quick ‘business opportunity’, strikes up an eccentric partnership with Rose’s son Oscar, who’s between schools.  Getting Alan Arkin for the role of Joe after Little Miss Sunshine was not original thinking but he’s awfully good – and it is in fact a very different part:  Joe Lorkowski keeps most of what he’s feeling inside.   Arkin’s acting looks marvellously simple nowadays.  Jason Spevack gives Oscar a blend of wilfulness and good manners that’s very appealing, and he too is pleasingly natural.

    The characters that don’t make sufficient impression in Sunshine Cleaning are the biohazardous houses themselves.  Christine Jeffs doesn’t communicate the sense of vacation and the residue of a particular human existence that should be part of the texture and atmosphere of these places, along with the debris and insects, the bad smells and bloodstains:  the ‘crime scenes’ are mostly played for physically discomfiting but predictable comedy.  And while this may reflect the director’s limitations (although this film is a big improvement on Jeffs’s hopeless Sylvia (2003)), it also points to fundamental weaknesses in Megan Holley’s screenplay.  We eventually learn that the sisters were traumatised as young girls by discovering their mother’s suicide at home.  Even if we accept that no mention is made of this personal history at the point they get into their new line of work, it’s hard to believe that it ever becomes just a job to Rose and Norah.   The plotting that generates the climax and resolution of the story is clumsily implausible.  When she is contacted about a clean-up job by an insurance company, Rose is excited:  she thinks it could be their big break.  It’s incredible that she trusts the wildly unreliable Norah to get to work on this assignment unsupervised just so that Rose can attend the baby shower of a high-school friend, whose house she found herself cleaning at the start of the film.  There’s no convincing reason for Rose’s accepting the invitation to the shower:  it must be as obvious to her as it is to us that she’ll be despised by her drearily comfortable contemporaries.  It’s an unmissable engagement only because Megan Holley can’t think of a better way of getting her screenplay into the home straight.

    9 July 2009

  • Mid-August Lunch

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Pranzo di ferragosto

    Gianni di Gregorio (2008)

    Matteo Garrone, who directed Gomorrah, and Gianni di Gregorio, who worked with him (and others) on its screenplay, joined forces for a second time in 2008 to make a film which could hardly be more different. Garrone produced; di Gregorio wrote, directed and plays the main part of Gianni, a sixtyish bachelor who shares a Rome apartment with his aged mother and finds himself giving hospitality to three more old women during the mid-August national holiday.   I’ve a neurotic fear of uninvited guests invading the house so there were times when I shuddered – especially when the women want to extend their stay – but Mid-August Lunch also suffered from a more persistent incidental interference.  Even at 75 minutes, the film is slightly tedious but the main reason I was relieved when it was over was the almost continuous laughter of one woman in the Richmond Filmhouse audience – a loud solo effort which seemed so alien to the mildness of the film’s humour that it got to be almost obstructive.  It was only after we’d got out of the theatre that I felt I could see the film clearly. I enjoyed it more in immediate retrospect than as I was watching.

    Their apartment is much bigger than Gianni and his mother (usually) need but it’s not clear why they’ve got so behind with the rent – or whether Gianni is out of a job or already retired.  When Luigi, the ‘administrator’ for the apartment block, comes round to discuss the rent problem, he has a clear ulterior motive:  he wants his mother off his hands for the holiday and he asks Gianni to do the honours, in exchange for some help with the rental arrears.  The scene in which Gianni’s doctor, Marcello, asks for his mother to join the holiday ménage doesn’t make the same kind of sense:  it’s Gianni, worried about a pain in his side, who’s asked the doctor to call round.  Only after Marcello has examined and reassured Gianni that there’s nothing much to worry about does he suddenly insist that his mother stay.  (Why doesn’t Marcello – knowing Gianni to be mildly hypochondriac – call round to enquire about the patient’s health, keeping the real reason for his visit up his sleeve?)  For the most part, though, the screenplay is very skilful.   The story may be simple but di Gregorio avoids the inherent risk of writing a miniaturist, undramatic piece – the risk of having so little happen that almost any forward movement of the plot can seem forced.

    Mid-August Lunch presents a situation and discloses the characters in it:  there’s (just about) enough to bring the story to a climax but there’s no artificial resolution and the development of the women’s reactions to each other is convincing.  Gianni’s mother and Luigi’s mother, Marina, used to being the centre of attention, both sulk in isolation (and in their different ways) because they’re in a group and so in competition.  Luigi’s Aunt Maria and Marcello’s mother, Grazia, are more grateful for the company.  You get the sense that Mamma joins in eventually for fear of being left out – of others having fun.  Marina absconds and Gianni finds her having a drink and a cigarette in a nearby café:  when he gets her back to the apartment, Marina briefly tries to seduce him.  (You know nothing will happen and you don’t want it to:  by this stage, what the exhausted Gianni really wants is to sleep – on his own – and this is what you want for him too.)

    Marina’s flirting with Gianni suggests geriatrics behaving badly – a potentially very tiresome idea.  The film does have an element of this but di Gregorio judges it well and makes the consequences believable.  The episode in the café and its aftermath are sufficient displays of independence to mellow Marina.  Grazia, anxious to make the most of a day off from her doctor son’s vigilance about diet and medication, wraps pieces of cured meat round her finger and consumes them at a rate of knots when she first arrives in the kitchen of the apartment.  That night, she takes the remains of a macaroni casserole to bed with her.   Gianni emerges next morning to find all four women enjoying each other’s company. When one of them gives Gianni money to buy food for the lunch of the film’s title and, a little later, another bribes him to allow them to stay for an evening meal, it’s funny and poignant (so is their dancing together during the closing credits).  Although they’ve talked about the importance of their memories, they seem to realise that they have an opportunity to enjoy something in the present and eventually they don’t want it to end.  As far as Gianni is concerned, it means he continues to be put upon but it all helps with the rent.

    The four women are a wonderfully contrasting collection of physical types – and their playing is very satisfyingly orchestrated. Gianni di Gregorio often shoots their faces in close-up and beautifies their extreme old age – especially that of Gianni’s mother (Valeria De Franciscis).  We first see her, frail and unadorned, listening – inattentively – to the bedtime story (The Three Musketeers) that Gianni reads her.  During the day, however, she determinedly gets dressed up and carefully applies her lipstick; her wrinkled, weather-beaten skin is proof of, as she says, ‘a life in the sun’.  Marina Cacciotti, as Luigi’s mother Marina, is amusingly blowsy and her bulk helps to express Marina’s bolshiness.   Maria Cali, as Aunt Maria, has a lovely gentleness – she seems both distrait and, at a deeper level, content.  As the doctor’s mother, Grazia Cesarini Sforza has an inquisitive, playful sociability that is very appealing.

    Gianni is, of course, the pivotal figure in the story.  Gianni di Gregorio gives him a slightly melancholy benignity and manages to achieve what it is obviously crucial to the conception of the character:  although Gianni is usually on screen, he seems to be in the background too.  But there’s one moment during the lunch that brings him sharply into focus – a profile shot of Gianni failing to get a word in edgeways.  You can see from this that’s the story of his life. Gianni always seems to be behind the beat:  things happen too quickly for him – he’s too slow even to express his frustration.  (There’s another good moment when Gianni sees Luigi departing for his holiday weekend – allegedly to join his family – with a remarkably young and pretty female companion, who is getting into his car.)    What’s good about di Gregorio’s performance is that he doesn’t stress the pathos of Gianni’s situation.  Looking after his mother and her guests may take it out of him and he has some regret about his life being as it is; yet you sense that he not only lacks the will to make it different but rather likes it this way.   The three other men in the story are all well played too.  (It appears from IMDB that very few of the cast, men or women, have acted professionally before.)  Alfonso Santagata is Luigi; Marcello Ottolenghi is Marcello; and Luigi Marchetti is Viking, a vagabondish local, who gives Gianni a lift on his motor bike through the deserted streets of Rome, with all the shops closed for ferragosto, in a quest for the makings of lunch.   Viking comes back to the apartment to join in the lunch then falls asleep on the bed that Gianni is longing to reclaim.

    The cinematographer Gian Enrico Bianchi captures the – in my experience – distinctive quality of Roman light (the way that white buildings and deep, dark shadow combine to intensify it).  The director and his editor Marco Spoletini get across the ralentissement induced by high summer heat – and di Gregorio cleverly uses the opening titles to establish this slightly dazed tempo.  (The titles appear while Gianni and Viking are enjoying a mid-morning drink and desultory conversation outside a wine shop.    Because you have one eye on the credits, the rhythm of the scene communicates itself without your quite noticing.)    And it’s always good too to see Italian cuisine being prepared – as well as hearing Italians talk about the food as they prepare it.

    21 August 2009

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