Junebug gets it right
If you grew up in the South and appreciate the good things about the south, you are fully aware of the movie version: slack-jawed-conepone-three-teeth-chewing Geeezus-freakish-narrow-minded-kitsch-ridden-
somewhatgoodheartedalthosomewhatbigoted-semi-buffoons. We sweat a lot (see 'Time to Kill'). We are either blander than a church-dinner cookie-crumb-vanilla-pudding pie or we are just freaking WEIRD.
Watching the first few minutes of Junebug un-reeling, I was thinking - here we go AGAIN. We have the Gumpish-artistic-bible-quoting savant and we have bizarre folk-art festooning our streets. Here comes the attractive, somewhat coolish, intelligient Northerner and aren't we going to have fish-out-of-water-fun when the oil and water attempt to mix.
But something happened on the road to Deliverance. The folk-artist's declaration that he wants to make the invisible visible becomes the touchpoint of the film. The southern family that the cool Chicago art gallery owner marries into becomes flesh. Our northerner begins to have an understanding of her husband that she could never have garnered in Chicago. Each member of the family from the at-first-cloying and then amazing pregnant-daughter-in-law (Amy Adams) to her sullen angry husband (played by the guy who portrays Ryan on The O.C.) are shown both in moments of desperate isolation and knitted together in moments of grace...moments as simple as trying to tape a TV show and the wood-carving of a small bird.
Important to me, raised (some might say dragooned) in THE church, and engorged with church-supper-casseroles and Wednesday night prayer meetings, is that a movie GETS this southern church social life. Not just making fun, but understanding what church suppers are really like down in those church basements, and understanding what kind of food that people bring to such events. You don't have to like it, but it is rare that any movie gets close to this kind of compassionate understanding.
Junebug gets it right. There is a moment in the movie, when the art gallery owner's husband is singing a hymn during the church supper, when things heretofore incomprehensible slowly emerge into shape and form.
Real people becoming visible....I can't ask for anything more in a movie.
