#18: Junebug
(USA, 2005; dir. Phil Morrison; scr. Angus MacLachlan; cin. Peter Donahue; with
Embeth Davidtz, Amy Adams, Alessandro Nivola, Benjamin McKenzie, Celia Weston, Scott Wilson, Frank Hoyt Taylor, Joanne Pankow, Alicia Van Couvering, Beth Bostic)
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Even among the so-called "small" movies that are out there, I see precious, precious few that don't arrive to me via a multimillion dollar marketing campaign
that is delivering a product with a six- or seven- or eight-figure budget that is eventually unveiled to me in a heavily capitalized movie theater after I've
read reviews or feature stories about it in magazines and newspapers that have workforces and production costs I can't even estimate. Amidst all of that context,
it's absurd for me ever to feel like I "discovered" a movie, but nonetheless, that's how Junebug felt to me, and still feels. I totally missed the minor
January news-blips that surely recorded Amy Adams receiving a Special Jury Prize for acting at Sundance, even though this is the sort of minuscule Arts Section
item that has previously led to memorable encounters with mini-indies like Brother to Brother, Down to
the Bone, and All the Real Girls, so I'm always on the lookout. And I know I saw some Sundance coverage,
because I knew to hunt down that year's Hustle & Flow, Murderball, Police
Beat, Me and You and Everyone We Know, and Grand Jury Prize winner Forty Shades of Blue
as soon as I could (and all of them, to a one, are indeed marvelous). But on September 11, 2005, in New York City (a framework of time and place not without
resonance), I took a chance on Junebug because it was playing down the street from my partner's workplace while I waited for him to finish his shift,
and I harbored residual affection for Embeth Davidtz for The Gingerbread Man and Schindler's List,
Alessandro Nivola for Face/Off and Laurel Canyon, Scott Wilson in Monster
(I didn't screen In Cold Blood till later that fall), and Celia Weston in everything, even though none of them seemed at
risk of seeing their careers overly canonized. Stephen Holden had an effusive blurb on the not-especially-promising poster, but Stephen Holden is close to
the bottom of the list of critics I obey. I didn't expect a thing.
Exactly three months later, on December 11, I saw the film again in Hartford, Connecticut, and this second theatrical outing more than convinced me that my
feeling (whatever its justifications) of stumbling into a radiant, unheralded artifact had not prompted me to over-value the movie. This Favorites Countdown
isn't intended as a venue for expressing what's good about these movies so much as what I like about them, but of course the distinction keeps
breaking down in a multitude of ways, and in Junebug's case, my instantaneous and extraordinary fondness for it had heaps to do with the fact of how
unexpectedly shrewd and well-made I felt it to be, in the guise of yet another no-budget indie dramedy about a quirky family riven by fractious American tensions
writ small, and with all their teeth extracted. The movie is smart, and sensitive about its characters and their stories, but not in that hyper-demonstrative
and drippy way that movies (and some people) often adopt to make a point of how "sensitive" they are. Director Phil Morrison and writer Angus MacLachlan,
neither of whom has slated a follow-up project in the last four years, had clearly thought about what to film in relation to what and how their characters
would remember. They edited with a mind to what makes a quick, durable impression without fully giving up the ghost of what is awkward or luminous or hurtful
about this moment, little of which we realize toward some later, comparably economical but suggestive moment. The brisk, curious, unwordy opening at Davidtz's
gallery auction is all the movie needed, even that first time, to tip its flush hand: sophisticated humanism, idiomatic specificity, wit, panache, mystique (he's "going to
buy the UFO," but why not the painting that he says "makes me happy," and why can't we see the UFO?). Plus an adult sexiness that's worthy of the term.
That's when my heart surged with the hope that Junebug was good. When we meet rural artist David Wark a few minutes later, wrestling his visions of
priapic warfare and brightly frieze-like history onto rough-hewn canvas, presented in the full frankness of his oddity and his prejudices, my heart kept moving:
it leapt to the certainty that I loved the movie, whether or not it continued to be good. The camera's habit of dwelling on these canvases, repeated in its
tendency to dwell on treelines and living rooms and church socials as though they are paintings (not that the compositions are ever "painterly," just still
and presentational and detailed) communicated Junebug's wise and serene propensity to study, feel, and learn from almost anything, and to completely
bypass the question of budget by constructing an internal poetics that don't cost a thing. That means delicately postponed conversations and precisely managed
dramatic beats; revelation, either homespun (carvings and wall-hangings) or far-flung (meerkats and Huck Finn) that reveal the characters' imaginations
as well as the tree-rings of their personalities; swift but generous sidebars like the compressed day we spend at Johnny's warehouse, to see the congeniality
and openness he's learned or decided to hide in the house; faces where things are happening, as when Peg is judging her daughter-in-law with a series of
modulated nose-wrinkles, and when Ashley lets it slowly sink in that Madeleine really and truly was born in Japan, and when poppa Eugene dances inside with
whatever unexpressed, sympathetic thought seems about to make him cry. You can go as small as you want into Junebug and find tiny delights: the way
Peg is either mocking or trying to make sense of Madeleine's accent when she repeats the word "Wark," nervously, as "woak"; the way Ashley has to reboot for
a few seconds after Madeleine says "fuck," and the way Madeleine shuffles through a whole clutch of thoughts and tactful approaches as she prepares to answer
another of Ashley's unexpected questions. Davidtz didn't get much credit for this performance, but the way she balances the rich and touch-seeking expressivity
of her hands agains the severity of her look and (in this context) of her rarefied urban affect is a choreographic and psychological marvel.
If I keep going, I won't stop—say, into the rhythms that never vary too conspicuously, and yet you always sense when one movement in the film's structure has ended
and something subtly different has begin. Or into that sequestered hospital conversation between Nivola's George and Amy Adams' Ashley that opens up a new
channel, even a new species of intimacy compared to what else we've seen in the movie—a contrast to the sharp asperity that George has recently shown his work-distracted
wife, left hanging and pitifully sorry at the Warks'. What does it mean to watch Junebug and to contemplate why its moniker is the name of a dead child?
I don't know, except to say how quickly my body moves to block a reading of Junebug that would indenture its bouquets of nuance and its phosphorescent
withholdings to one monolithic would-be clue. "Junebug" doesn't get us any further than "Rosebud" does; surely the real wonder is that Junebug, whatever
its manifold and comparative modesties, makes me as curious about its people and its universe as Kane does. And how else to put it? I adore it so.