Junebug

Last night, Freda invited me over for dinner and recommended a movie I've just finished, and may start all over again.  I love this movie--more than any "Southern" movie I've ever seen!

The South, the Deep South, the Bible Belt South, fascinates people outside it, but most movies hokey it up so much (either that or romanticize it into saccharine)  that I can't bear to watch them.  Amy Adams and the whole cast of this show did a spectacular job of capturing the nuances of the South as I know it.  Except maybe for the accent of one of the characters (the artist), the movie is blessedly lacking in caricature and phony Southern accents.

Most people who try to "do" Southern accents make me cringe and shout, inside my head, in a genuinely angry Southern accent, "Pleeeese stop!  You're killing me!"

When I studied Southern literature in college, I read William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, I didn't yet understand the ambivalence people feel about the places in which they grew up--captured so well in one character's words about the South:

“I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!”
― William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

The last words of Junebug echo the spirit of Faulkner, the protesting--too-much of a man who both loves and hates all that his North Carolina childhood small town represents.

I'm struck by Amy Adams' character's irrepressible optimism, the visiting art gallery owner's  understanding of her husband's Southern family, the silences and unanswered questions in the plot, the understated tokens of love, the anger over dreams that dried up too soon, all the things that are said and unsaid that add up to an amazing portrait, not of "the South" as a whole but of one believable and authentic Southern family.

I was so moved by the movie, can't recommend it heartily enough! I loved the hearts of the characters, the tenderness that rarely finds words, and the tragi-comedy of family discords. I was moved to real tears by a little carved bird made by a man for a woman he loves and understands--but who can't seem to muster the words to tell her so.  To the wife of his son, he simply says, "She keeps herself hidden."

The ways people annoy, misunderstand, and comfort each other--the makers of this movie get it.