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"  Christine Jeffs&amp;#039; filmography is only three movies long so far, but what&amp;#039;s there is certainly choice. A former commercials director in her native New Zealand, Jeffs made a quietly dazzling feature debut in 2001, the broody loss-of-innocence drama Rain. Two years later, she went big-time with Sylvia, starring Daniel Craig and a superb Gwyneth Paltrow as the lethally stormy poet couple Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Now Jeffs goes for laughs in Sunshine Cleaning, set in New Mexico with Amy Adams and Emily Blunt as hard-up sisters who discover that there&amp;#039;s good money to be made by mopping up the grisly aftermath of such criminal acts as murder and suicide. Confronting the awful detritus of death, Jeffs grounds her absurdist comedy in a clear-eyed compassion for life&amp;#039;s hard knocks that never feels sentimental, just smart. Mary Lynn Rajskub, who plays a woman Blunt&amp;#039;s character tracks down after cleaning up her dead mother&amp;#039;s apartment, assured a reporter at the Sundance film festival that the movie was &amp;quot;more interesting than disgusting.&amp;quot; Indeed. In cruder hands, or maybe just currently fashionable male ones, Sunshine Cleaning could be a great gross-out comedy. But Jeffs is after something else. She&amp;#039;s thrillingly savvy about what drives people and what trips them up; there&amp;#039;s a cool perspicacity at work in her hotly emotional movies. Sunshine Cleaning doesn&amp;#039;t stint on deeper feelings, starting with the tension between the sisters. Responsible single mother Rose (Adams) does housework for a living and is desperate to get her anxious young son, Oscar (Jason Spevack), who has started licking the walls in class, into a more sympathetic school. Rose, a former cheerleader who went steady with the quarterback, knows her life peaked in high school, yet she remains unyielding in her sweetness and optimism. Which brings out the sarcasm in her depressed younger sister, Norah (Blunt), who still lives with their struggling father, Joe (Alan Arkin), and sleeps her days away between the fast-food waitress gigs she regularly gets fired from. The wedge between the sisters is a painful absence: the mother who left them long ago. Rudely hilarious as the raunchy grandpa in Little Miss Sunshine, Arkin gives a beautifully understated performance here. Like Rose, Joe is a determined optimist, albeit one with years of disappointment etched on his face. Everyone in Sunshine Cleaning does good work, including Steve Zahn as the cheeseball married cop Rose is having a dead-end affair with and Clifton Collins Jr. (so creepily fine in Capote) as the kind, partly disabled guy who sells her industrial cleaning equipment so that she and Norah can stop trying to wash away rivers of blood with a bottle of Fantastik. Jeffs has a way with such visual metaphors, but she really makes magic with her actresses, whether it&amp;#039;s the tyro in Rain or Paltrow, whose turn as the tormented Plath is a personal best. Blunt and Adams are two of the brightest comic stars of the decade, but they&amp;#039;re also good dramatic actresses, and the way they deploy both aspects of their talent is the movie&amp;#039;s central pleasure. Jeffs doesn&amp;#039;t always get everything right, although she pretty much did in Rain. Sylvia has an overbearing score, and in Sunshine the story line involving Rajskub feels truncated; she&amp;#039;s too compelling a screen presence not to have a payoff. Still, for all its bright, easy style, this is a very sophisticated comedy, shot through with melancholy and precariously poised on underpinnings of the most dire realism. Jeffs never loses her footing. There&amp;#039;s humor in those virtuoso cleanup scenes, some of it daringly close to slapstick. But there&amp;#039;s pathos, too, and, better yet, respect, as Jeffs&amp;#039; camera pauses to acknowledge the dime-store treasures someone lovingly arranged on an end table or take in the dreadful stains around the bullet hole in a recliner where a terminally ill man hastened his death. Loss large and small is Sunshine Cleaning&amp;#039;s unstated theme; it&amp;#039;s there in the wordless hope and hurt that play across Rose&amp;#039;s face during a motel tryst and in Norah&amp;#039;s secret, almost ceremonial effort to experience a physical connection with the mother she can barely remember. At one point, Rose describes their work as restoring a degree of peace and wholeness to places where terrible things have happened. Humor is a form of insight. Wrapping its buoyant comedy around the pain of life, Sunshine Cleaning sends us out of the theater consoled. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/reviews/a9710/the-human-stain-299092/>