As I watched the remarkable and resonate “Sunshine Cleaning,” the phrase that kept coming to my mind was “woman’s work.” In our sexist world, where fearful, power-clutching little men do everything from undervalue to actually oppress women (and worse), we have continually been told that certain things are woman’s work. Cleaning, for instance.
“Sunshine Cleaning” is all about woman’s work—and not just in the all-too-obvious way in which it is truly never done, but in that this moving movie about motherlessness and the open, bleeding wounds it causes, was written by a woman, directed by a woman, and features pitch-perfect performances by two talented young women. The work that all these women do is as good as any being done by their male counterparts—and far better in ways only work done by women can be.
Perhaps, moving forward from our shameful sexist past and present, we should, instead of dispensing with the phrase “woman’s work,” use it in the future not as a designation of certain limited and limiting tasks, but to describe the extraordinary quality femininity brings to all forms of labor and creation.
“Sunshine Cleaning,” which might help us take a step toward that end, is the story of Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams), who finds herself a single mother attempting to support her son Oscar (Jason Spevack) and her unreliable sister Norah (Emily Blunt) while working a mundane job as a maid. Once the head cheerleader in school with plenty of prospects, Rose now has little to show for her years, and while she still sees the former lead football player (Steve Zahn), it is little more than a despondent affair. When Oscar is expelled from public school, Rose takes a job as a bio-hazard crime-scene cleaner to help pay for a private education and brings Norah on to help in her steadily growing business. As the sisters work to clean up the messes left behind by the chaotic lives of others, they must learn to reconcile their own differences and overcome a troubled past if they hope to prosper in their newfound venture.
Though the film is so textured, and has many, many themes, I keep coming back to motherlessness, and see it as not just the emptiness so profoundly felt at the core of the film, but of our time, as well.
I happen to be reading Thomas Dumm’s “Loneliness as a Way of Life” right now, which heightened my experience of “Sunshine Cleaning,” for in using Cordelia and King Lear to explain the current culture of loneliness, he says, “We live in the matrix of the missing mother, in the paradoxical context of no context, in the open world of storms into which we moderns have been cast.”
Perhaps the mother we’re missing most is the one we most need. The loss of the feminine face of God, of the mother hen who wants to gather us like her little chicks, of the compassionate womb who can nurture us in the way only the one who gave birth to us can, causes us far more despair and loneliness and anxiety than we can even fathom.
The film uses an extremely simple, but effective device with a CB radio in which a couple of characters use it to speak into the void—into emptiness, motherlessness, into Job’s whirlwind of isolation and loneliness.
Rose does the woman’s work of cleaning up after others. She cleans up the messes other people make not merely as a maid in rich people’s houses or as a forensic cleaner at crime scenes, but as a woman in life, because it’s generally women who have the strength and grace and will to do so—something deserving of honor not derision. Mostly, Rose is cleaning up the mess her own mother made—mothering herself, her little sister, her young son, and even, to some extent, her own father (a well-intentioned, but often unreliable, mostly lost man played by the extraordinary Alan Arkin).
“Sunshine Cleaning” is a chick flick, not in the normal Hollywood sense when women are attempting to find something ultimately only men can give them, but in the very best sense—one in which a film written and directed by women features women in the strength and vulnerability and beauty and complexity of womanhood. It’s a film only women could make, but one which both men and women should see as soon as they possibly can.
No comments:
Post a Comment