Ray Pride

A dog wanders down the road because that is what a dog does, it wanders down the road.

Phil Morrison's "Junebug" is a hard nut. An observant, patient, masterful first feature, this unyielding narrative examines a North Carolina family in all its tragicomic self-isolation. Morrison, whose earlier work includes videos for Yo La Tengo (who also scored "Junebug"), has cited Yasujiro Ozu, the Japanese master of family dramas as an influence, as well as Renoir, Iranian realists Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf and Mike Leigh, but there are also affinities to the Southern master of color and offhand observation, the photographer William Eggleston. Yet, while the surfaces of the story suggest an easily dismissed sort of regional drama, the movie is more resistant, obstinate, and ultimately both loving and lovely.

George (Alessandro Nivola) hails from North Carolina, and after a sudden marriage to Madeleine, a Brit-born, Chicago-based dealer in outsider art (Embeth Davidtz), they go to Winston-Salem for a few days. Madeleine's got a lead on an artist, David Wark (Frank Hoyt Taylor), who lives nearby and whose work is a confabulation of Howard Finster and Henry Darger. ("I see a face and it sticks in my head and I paint it.") Back at the house, there are other dramas: his resentful younger brother, Johnny (a simmering, dangerous Ben McKenzie) is no longer the shining high schooler and his manic, pregnant young wife, Ashley (a radiant and maddening Amy Adams, brilliantly capturing a prototypical Hell's Belle) is thrilled to have new folks to talk at. Ashley's beautiful and vital but near intolerable, yet Davis finds her soul. "You're here, you're here, where we live!" reads nonsensical on the page, but is pure honey in her mouth, as is the likes of "Look at you! You just light up a room!" Mom (Celia Weston) veils her feelings in scarring maternal sarcasm. (Refusing help with supper, she says, "Nobody messes in my kitchen.") Dad (Scott Wilson) putters in the basement, whittling and scouring the premises for a missing screwdriver. ("Where would I be if I was a screwdriver?" he asks his absent-minded self.)

Morrison's compositions and pacing, along with the rhythms of the script by Angus McLachlan, defeat expectations at every turn, with at least half-a-dozen events that remain mysterious. One would be golden boy George, who conks out on the couch to avoid family drama, having a shining moment at a church supper, where he sings a beautiful rendition of a hymn. "Junebug"'s surfaces and behavior are so accurately etched in the Southern experience that it's uncanny.

In an interview, I note the meanness under Mom's every utterance. Morrison nods. "Even the word, `Wellllll,'" he says. "My grandmother can just say that word and it would just have so much meaning." The film debuted at Sundance, but also played Cannes and New York's New Directors/New Directions. "I think at Sundance what was interesting, and in a way a challenge for this movie, is the fact it's undeniable that its subject matter is what people might sort of yawn about in relation to Sundance." He does a yawnsome voice, "'Oh, dysfunctional family, regional authenticity.' I think that regionalism is noble and important and I get it. You can't help but, if, for example, you're in the South in the eighties and suddenly REM redefines your sense of things because they're from here. I wanted this movie to be about that somehow, instead of being an example of it. I wanted to explore what makes us in the South need that. Y'know? But then it meant it was possible for people to see it as another one of... those."

What I found most challenging emotionally, as a viewer and as a Southerner born and bred, is how each character is a type that never explains themselves. (I know these people too well.) There's talk all the time, but they don't explain themselves. There are the shots of trees and dogs and front yards, but the most remarkable shot, as a composition, but also in its affect, is one of George and his father at a Waffle House along the highway. They're sitting in a booth, and after two beats, you know they won't say a word, and they're just sharing the moment, a gray, furiously overcast sky following the center line of a highway to the top of a hill, to the end of the frame. "That's why we [shot in North Carolina]," Morrison says. "That chain, the Waffle House, really is there. We didn't have to fudge naturalistic concerns about where they might go."

"Junebug" opens Friday at the Music Box.

(2005-08-09)

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