Junebug: Movie & DVD Review (2006)

(Originally published 2006)

With "Junebug" now available on DVD--and with its co-star, Amy Adams, recently nominated for an Academy Award--the time to see the movie is now. It's one of 2005's best films, featuring a story about small-town America that just gets it right.

As written by Angus MacLachlan, nuance is key here--one false note and the movie would have collapsed. That it doesn't is a testament to the skill and to the care that went into its conception.

Unlike the recent movie it most resembles, Cameron Crowe's mildly diverting yet schmaltzy "Elizabethtown," what "Junebug" offers is something honest, touching, and far more complex. It's a movie about the rural South and the people in it, though unlike "Elizabethtown," you never feel manipulated while watching it, or empty after seeing it. Instead, there's the sense that you've been allowed into a closed world, in which silence is used as a weapon, anger is an undercurrent, humor weaves through the neuroses and an uneasiness of outsiders goes along with the territory.

The movie stars Embeth Davidtz as Madeleine, a striking, sophisticated Chicago gallery owner who meets at her gallery the man who will become her husband. That would be George (Alessandro Nivola), about whom is a cosmopolitan polish that belies his simple upbringing in North Carolina, where he hasn't visited for three years.

When Madeleine has the opportunity to obtain an artist's work near George's hometown, off they go to North Carolina, where they plan to stay with George's family until Madeleine can seal the deal with the artist.

It's there that Madeleine is introduced for the first time to her husband's family, which includes his stoic father Eugene (Scott Wilson), meddling mother Peg (Celia Weston, excellent), seething brother Johnny (Benjamin McKenzie), and pregnant sister-in-law Ashley (Adams). It's Ashley who holds you. She's so rambunctiously chatty--and so desperate for the glamorous life she never had and likely never will have--that she immediately takes to Madeleine, who does have the life Ashley covets and who does do her best to understand this family in what increasingly becomes an awkward situation.

This is Morrison's first feature film, and he nails it. What's so satisfying about "Junebug," the title of which refers to the nickname of the child Ashley is carrying, aren't just the many small touches that are so spot-on, but how it guides us into and out of stories that never can be finished because the families involved are still creating them. Just like Madeleine, we're dropped into the center of a family we do not know, where eventually so much catches fire as each character must rediscover who they are in the presence of a new dynamic.

Most of us have been there before. There's the sense that Morrison and MacLachlan have been there a few times. Apparently, they took notes, because their movie is never anything less than authentic.

Grade: A