Civil Disunion
Art, family, and cultures clash in offbeat, observant 'Junebug'

A cutting-edge Chicago art gallery and a sleepy hamlet in North Carolina might seem to be worlds apart. But they're bound together by the complex pathology of family ties in Junebug, the rookie feature from director Phil Morrison. It's a wry, observant, often wistfully told culture-clash tale that ponders whether people are defined by where they came from, or what they make of themselves.

Scripted by Angus MacLachlan (like Morrison, a North Carolina native), the film also explores the metaphor of the outsider, as both antagonist to and catalyst for dynamic action within a closed community. The story begins at an art auction in Chicago devoted to what's "outsider" art: primitive, naïve, often surreal work produced by self-taught atists with no formal training far outside the mainstream art world.

Cosmopolitan art dealer and gallery owner Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz) falls for George (Alessandro Nivola), a good-looking new rep at the auction house. Married within a week, they spend six blissful months in the city, pursuing their exciting careers. When Madeleine gets word of a provocative, as yet undiscovered outsider artist in the backwoods of North Carolina, she decides to go down herself and sign him up with her gallery. Since George's boyhood home is only a half-hour away, they mix business with family obligations as George takes Madeleine home to meet the folks.

They're not exactly the Waltons. Harried mom Peg (Celia Weston) bustles around with an attitude of perpetual exasperation. Good-natured, ineffectual dad Eugene (Scott Wilson) is a monosyllabic shadow who mostly keeps to his woodshop in the garage. Surly kid brother Johnny (Ben McKenzie, from The OC), a walking vortex of unspecified anger and resentment, has moved back home with his very pregnant child-bride Ashley (Amy Adams), a flighty little chatterbox who hopes the baby will mend whatever's troubling her estranged young husband.

Chic, slender Madeleine, with her British accent, short city haircut, and sleek black clothes, might as well be from Mars. She's slightly older than George, and childless (to the alarm of every other female in town). But effusive Ashley engulfs her in unequivocal warmth, desperate for a girlfriend with whom to share her obsessions with weight, make-up and the mall. ("Do you diet?" Ashley bubbles, dragging Madeleine off to "play beauty parlor.") Yet Madeleine is often more present in the family than George, who reverts to his childhood mode of slinking off on his own, to read or dream, when the touchy family unit convenes.

Madeleine has more success with the ornery artist, David Wark (Frank Hoyt Taylor). Referred to by the locals as "that retarded artist," Wark speaks in a curdled molasses drawl, and paints cartoony Civil War scenes (on cardboard) in which troops fire on each other with their own giant phalluses, text-laden visons he claims come from God. (Although when he tells Madeleine "my job is to make the invisible visible," it's a direct quote from Swiss artist Paul Klee.)

Wark's paintings (original artwork by Ann Wood) are true to the violent, Southern Gothic surrealism of a lot of regional outsider art. And the way the family dynamics play out is observed with an equally artful and realistic sensibility. While the brothers barely speak, an elbow shrugged against another signals a truce in a moment of crisis. In a rare instant of affectionate intention, Johnny strugles to tape a TV program Ashley would like, then takes it out on her when he fails. As Madeleine discovers things she never knew about George, it's hard to tell if she's more flabbergasted by the hymn he sings so beautifully at a church social, or the information that he used to eat mayo with a spoon.

There are a few storytelling missteps. (It's doubtful Madeleine would be so unsophisticated as to go downstairs late at night to talk to Johnny, braless in a tight T-shirt and short shorts.) But the filmmakers are wise enough not to provide tidy answers for the parents' air of weary disappointment, or the source of Johnny's rift with his family and the world. And all the actors are marvelous, especially Adams' Ashley, who steals the movie with her buoyant, comic, and utterly authentic naiveté.

JUNEBUG With Embeth Davidtz, Alessandro Nivola, Ben McKenzie, and Amy Adams. Written by Angus MacLachlan. Directed by Phil Morrison. A Sony Classics release. Rated R. 107 minutes. (***)
Review published in Good Times, Sept. 1, 2005