JUNEBUG Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
Sony Pictures Classics
Grade: B+
Directed by: Phil Morrison
Written by: Angus Maclachlan
Cast: Amy Adams, Emberth Davidtz, Ben McKenzie, Alessandro
Nivola, Celia Weston, Scott Wilson, Frank Hoyt Taylor
Screened at: Sony, NYC, 7/18/05 With “Junebug,” director Phil Morrison and scripter Angus Maclachlan ask, “Can a hip, big city woman find happiness and fulfillment in the hills of North Carolina?” Er...for one week? The answer turns out to be...yes, and no...an ambivalence you might expect when you’re dealing with a film that has insightful and poignant dialogue, a meditative mood, first-rate acting and patient direction. This Sundance favorite is a superb character study of people on both sides of the North-South divide; a community of folk from the NC hills (filmed around Winston-Salem where the director was born) and a newly-married, passionate couple from Chicago. The former are not people who pay too much attention to the goings-on and sage commentary from Washington or New York, L.A. or Chicago, while the yuppies pay about as much attention to southern culture as they would to a junebug–the sort of little creature who’d get them riled up only if crushed on their automobile windshield. Therein lies what could have been a superficial, laugh-a-minute sitcom about the stereotypical views Yankees have of people south of the Mason-Dixon line but is instead a fleshed-out drama treating age-old themes like sibling rivalry, patronage and condescension, compromises and envy. The opening shots are of people hollering, once a form of communication and now a folk tradition in the North Carolina hills–thereby announcing that this movie is about people trying to connect across a great divide. Chicago art gallery manager Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz) and her new, younger husband George (Alessandro Nivola) are driving from their native Chicago to North Carolina to allow Madeleine to talk an eccentric painter work into being represented by her in her Chicago gallery. Since George’s parents and brother live nearby, they decide to stay over during the week. Since Madeleine speaks with the king’s English and describes her background as born in Japan as part of a diplomat’s family, she is correctly perceived by George’s down-home family as a snob despite her well-meaning and apparent liking for the ultra-friendly and naive Ashley–who is pregnant both in stomach and with an array of questions and comments to the woman she’s ready to accept as a sister. Sibling rivalry, a theme explored more fully by Arthur Miller in a play about a cop and his physician brother, is dealt with credibly. Johnny (Ben McKenzie), a young high-school dropout with a dead-end job, resents the success and sophistication of his college-educated brother, George. In fact most of the family consider George’s departure from North Carolina and residence in Chicago to be a betrayal–as if the Civil War, ardently painted by the eccentric David Wark (Frank Hoyt Taylor), were still raging. The story includes some transcendent moments of the sort that director Morrison has been eager to unfold, one of which being the way that the North Carolina community participates with fervor in prayer and hymns under the direction of their
Methodist pastor. Amy Adams has already been mentioned as a potential candidate for an Oscar. In her supporting(?) role as Ashley, she is friendly to a fault, eager to take Madeleine into the warmth of her embrace, while restraining fury at her laid-back, unambitious and sulking husband who’d rather not have the baby that his wife is carrying. To paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, “North is North and South is South/ And ne’er the twain shall meet. Well, not exactly true. See “Junebug” and find out why. Not Rated 107 minutes © 2005 by Harvey Karten
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