Junebug DVD | Movie Mail UK | DVDs and Blu-ray films direct

Star Review

It’s a little-known fact about the huge multi-million-dollar mega-hit Meet the Parents that the film itself is a remake of a small indie picture that was bought up by the studio and rarely seen thereafter. (Hollywood is unique in never wanting to show its working.) With Junebug, however, the indie sector reclaims the meet-the-parents set-up and does something more subtle, flavoursome and accomplished with it.

Embeth Davidtz plays Madeleine, a la-di-da art dealer who decides to combine business with pleasure in visiting an eccentric painter while stopping over at her husband George (Alessandro Nivola)’s family pad in North Carolina. Turns out these are good Baptist folk who, nonetheless, live some way off the beaten track and exist even further beyond the radar of a big city art dealer, however much Madeleine does her best to fit in.

The central gag in Meet the Parents (and Meet the Fockers, and Guess Who, and Monster-in-Law, and…) depends on how mismatched the two warring factions are, even as they’re really not. (Is Dustin Hoffman really that different from Robert De Niro?) By contrast, Junebug - directed by Phil Morrison from a screenplay by Angus Maclachlan - addresses very real schisms in American society: those between city slickers and country folk, the metropolitan and the Midwest, the profane world of art and the church.

Every element of Maclachlan’s screenplay points up the vast gulf between Madeleine and her hosts. Difference is encoded in the dialogue. Madeleine admits “I can’t do anything with my hands,” to which matriarch Celia Weston tartly responds “you don’t have to; you’re smart”, the most backhanded of compliments in this case. Even a flash, out-of-the-blue line like Weston’s appeal to her loitering son (“You lookin’ for an engraved invitation, or what?”) speaks multitudes about the character’s suspicion of anything fancy.

Difference is also there in the way the uptight Madeleine, all brain and keen instincts, is frequently partnered with her heavily pregnant sister-in-law Ashley (Amy Adams), all heart in a maternity dress. Adams’ vivacity is just one of the ways Morrison and Maclachlan avoid point-scoring on behalf of either faction: neither side is ever entirely in the right, but they have the right ideas, and we need them both to get along - just as the world needs the American Left and Right to better interact - if things are ever going to improve.

The film’s movement is in the direction of reconciliation, but Junebug is never predictable. The schism runs too deep and too wide to be easily bridged, and at times too deep and wide for comfort: there’s a major misunderstanding when Madeleine creeps downstairs after dark to help George’s younger brother (Ben McKenzie) with his homework, and her intervention is first interpreted as interference, then as sexual. When the family’s woodworking patriarch (Scott Wilson) looks around the nursery he’s built, and confesses “I have done some screwing in here”, the line is grasped in two very different ways by two very different people.

Crucially, viewers are left to think for themselves, rather than asked to pick a side and stick with it. Morrison has infused Junebug with a variety of pauses for thought - prayer rituals, songs, bursts of classical music, each presented in all sincerity - moments which find the characters (and the two sides of his audience) united. This type of material can lend itself all too easily to the twin poles of slapstick and sneering, but Morrison is almost alone amongst young American directors in appreciating that the stillness of empty or half-empty rooms can serve as an effective, sometimes poignant counterpoint to the hurly-burly of any family reunion.

Mike McCahill on 1st July 2006

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