GetOut Magazine

Hollow characters mark empty ‘Junebug'
By CRAIG OUTHIER
GET OUT

With its odd shapes, elliptical characters and languorous pulse of Southern self-hatred, “Junebug” is the sort of overreaching novelty that seems too determined to call attention to itself as a bona fide counterculture art film. To say the least, it makes for an unbecoming display, like a nouveau riche hillbilly flaunting the bling in an Olive Garden.

Director Phil Morrison and screenwriter Angus MacLachlan — both transplanted North Carolinians — have essentially created an avant-garde “Meet the Parents.” Embeth Davidtz (“Schindler's List”) plays Madeleine, a worldly, compassionate, British-born art dealer who runs a gallery for self-taught “outsider” artists in Chicago. Road-tripping it to North Carolina to pursue a mildly retarded painter (Frank Hoyt Taylor) who specializes in bloody Civil War tableaus full of giant phalluses and white-faced slaves, Madeleine and her new dreamboat husband, George (Alessandro Nivola from “Laurel Canyon”), take the opportunity to visit his family, whom Madeleine has never met.

The reception is less than cozy. George's father (Scott Wilson from “In Cold Blood”) is a distant, taciturn man who spends his days looking for a lost screwdriver. The mother (Celia Weston) is a chain-smoking harridan who can't stand the fact that her precious Scott picked a pretty, sophisticated wife who looks and acts nothing like her. The kid brother (Ben McKenzie from “The O.C.”) is a mopey high school dropout who barely bothers to conceal a deep, explosive resentment toward the more successful, more self-possessed George.

The only family member who responds to Madeleine's sweet, open-armed entreaties is George's pregnant sister-in-law, Ashley, played by Amy Adams (“Catch Me If You Can”). Winner of a Sundance Film Festival jury prize for acting, Adams outshines her co-stars as the baby-ripened chatterbox, unbowed by her husband's emotional neglect and bursting with bright-eyed Southern denial.

There's a problem with these characters: They feel prejudged and pre-sentenced, hollow signifiers in a culture from which the filmmakers seem proud to have defected. This is most true in Madeleine's phallus-painting artist, who — with his thoughtless racism and retarded sense of chivalry — seems to embody Morrison's microcosmic vision of the modern South.

In his most desultory, self-indulgent moments, Morrison — who previously directed music videos for Sonic Youth and Juliana Hatfield — grabs blindly for style. A pointless montage of the family's empty, silent home becomes ironically emblematic of the film's defining flaw: Empty, ham-fisted artsiness.