Junebug

At the beginning: “Oh God, this isn’t one of those highly experimental student films with no plot or dialog, is it?” At the end: “What’s for dinner?”

Gotta tell ya, Junebug didn’t make much of an impact. At the start of it (after my student film fear was assuaged), I thought it played to stereotypes too much. The city folk were thinking “let’s exploit those country bumpkins and hold them up for ridicule by pretending we’re really their friends.” The country bumpkins were of course thinking “yoo shur doo got purtee legs.” That’s a direct quote from the movie, by the way. As the movie went on, stereotypes gave way to deeply complex people, and a few touches the movie added I really appreciated, but overall, it was a forgettable experience.

George (Alessandro Nivola) and Madeline (Embeth Davidtz) are art dealers in Chicago, and when the movie opens (on the characters), they see each other from across a room, and there is an instant connection. A week later they are married. The hitch comes when they have to go to North Carolina to court an artist to come to their company, right near where George’s family lives. Madeline has never met them, and is excited to. Within the Johnstons, the family dynamics are so bizarre and so outside my understanding that the family was completely inaccessible to me. The pregnant daughter-in-law of the family Ashley (Amy Adams) is very different from the rest of them; bubbly, friendly, and painfully extroverted. As the movie goes on, you see that she is also strong, loving, selfless, sincere, and strawberry-sweet. Adams deserved her Oscar nomination for this role, but it was a very bright spot amidst a pretty mediocre film.

Johnny, Ashley’s husband and George’s younger brother (Ben McKenzie), is a complex (if distasteful) character. He says but little, never smiles, is very disconnected from everything, and is ridiculously unhappy. He is still living with his parents despite the fact that he’s married, and finds more contentment at his minimum-wage job than he does with his wife and future baby. And even so, he cares for Ashley. When he sees that a documentary about meerkats (Ashley’s favorite animal) is on TV, he scrambles to videotape it, is unable to find an adequate tape, swears horribly with Ashley’s baby shower going on upstairs, and when Ashley comes down to find out what’s going on, he angrily blames the incident on her, without telling her his intentions. And then, when he has to write a report about Huckleberry Finn for his GED test, Madeline volunteers to help him, but he ruins it by getting angry at her and then trying to make a pass at her. What is this guy doing?

Despite Adams’ great and winning performance, Junebug is a little too boring, standard, and unexciting to be worthwhile. There is only one twist (I won’t reveal it here), but it doesn’t shock the system like the rest of the movie requires; it just saddens it. The one credit I do give the movie is its treatment of small-town Christians, which is not the typical Hollywood treatment. They present them as very kind-hearted, loving individuals, who gather together without much fanfare but with a lot of love. They’re not bigoted, homophobic, or intolerant, which is how movies usually paint them. Most of the Christians I know aren’t these things either, and it’s great to see them presented in a slightly more realistic light.

Iconic lines:
“Where would I be if I was a screwdriver?”

22 Rating: -4

Particle Man