Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:
My guess is that a lot of the people reading this have at least one screenplay in progress. Might I make a suggestion? You know that Big Secret you've got lurking somewhere in the third act — the traumatic past incident that retroactively explains your characters' troubling present-day neuroses? Ditch it. Lose it. Nuke it. You don't need it. It doesn't help.
Had I made this plea a year ago, perhaps we might all have been spared the ordeal of Sunshine Cleaning, one of the big-buzz titles in this year's Dramatic Competition. Directed by New Zealand native Christine Jeffs, whose mildly promising debut Rain now seems a distant memory (she also made Sylvia, the inert Plath biopic starring Gwyneth Paltrow), it stars Amy Adams and Emily Blunt, both in reasonably fine form, as hard-luck sisters who start a new business wiping up the blood and viscera that accumulates at crime scenes. The ick factor makes for a few funny moments, but, alas, screenwriter Megan Holley has more serious issues in mind. Both young women seem devoted to their father (Alan Arkin, reprising his labored shtick from that other Sunshine movie), but Mom is nowhere in sight. Might our heroines possibly be working through some personal issues related to the discovery of a bloody, horrific mess? And isn't that conveeeenient. People, this sort of Freudian nonsense is killing narrative fiction. Characters are far more intriguing and memorable when their behavior can't be reduced to the sum of their childhood traumas. Just let them be however screwed up they are; we'll happily speculate about the cause. (Case in point: the underrated Margot at the Wedding.)
Unfortunately, I failed to get into Sugar, which all reports suggest boasts the same impressive degree of relaxed naturalism as Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's previous Sundance triumph, Half Nelson. But it sounds like the antidote to the Sunshine Cleanings that infest this festival.
