Junebug

Just the opposite of the previously reviewed film, the characters in Phil Morrison’s debut directorial effort have an earned ambiguity. They are mysterious and open-ended, even while nakedly revealed and boxed into the corner of family and self. We see them in bits and pieces, seemingly pinned down but squirming free of our expectations. Alessandro Nivola and Embeth Davidtz are a recently-wed and still-horny husband and wife (as they were brother and sister in Patricia Rozema’s delicious Mansfield Park.) She is a Chicago art gallery dealer, born in Japan of British diplomat parents, who goes to North Carolina to pursue an outsider artist whose specialty is pornographic visions of the Civil War dictated by God. He is a successfully escaped cracker homeboy (and Baptist choirboy!) taking the chance to introduce his wife to his insular family, setting off all sorts of cultural and personal collisions. There’s some redneck humor, but the ironies are fair and balanced, all the characters are round enough to have good and bad sides. The film slows to a rocking-on-the-front-porch Southern pace, as the high-powered Davidtz tries to fit in, but metabolically cannot. Amy Adams provides the heart and soul of the film, as the wide-eyed and eager, very pregnant and not nearly as dumb as she seems sister-in-law, who delivers this dropdead line to her transcendently mopey husband, testament to the sharpness of Angus MacLachlan’s screenplay and summation of the film’s approach: “God loves you just the way you are, but He loves you too much to let you stay that way.” (2005, Images, n.) *7+* (MC-80, RT-87.)