Junebug

Recently married, George (Alessandro Nivola) and Madelaine (Embeth Davidtz) are on a trip to help Madelaine secure ‘outsider’ painter David Wark (Frank Hoyt Taylor) for her gallery.  As luck would have it, Wark lives near George’s family, and so, the business trip becomes a family one.  The Johnsten’s are a close knit family, presided over by Peg (Celia Weston), whose oppressive presence can be felt in the spare neatness of the house.  Also living in the Johnsten home are George’s silent father (Scott Wilson), his angry brother Johnny (Ben MacKenzie) and Johnny’s very pregnant wife Ashley (Amy Adams).  Madelaine and George arrive in the midst of what seems to be a typical morning, Johnny growling about running out of cigarettes, Peg nagging at him to help out, and Ashley chattering, over excited about the impending arrival of the newly weds.  Ashley is the one who makes an effort to make Madelaine feel welcome, taking her up to the spare room and  painting her nails, talking the whole time.  Peg is openly hostile.  In her opinion, Madelaine is too beautiful and too smart to make a good wife.  The story revolves around this clash of values, and as many reviews of the film have observed, the strong characterisation and excellent performances allow both Madelaine and the Johnsten’s plenty of room to display both their positive and negative points.

Empty rooms punctuate Junebug (2005, Phil Morrison).  Madelaine’s empty gallery after an auction, the strangely lifeless dining room in the Johnsten’s home, the Johnsten’s kitchen after a storm of words, the front lawn, green and well-watered.  These empty rooms are presented just as they are, in longish single shots, from a fixed camera position. A shot of the Johnsten’s dining room shows a gleaming table and a bit of a sideboard.  The room is too neat, the few knick knacks placed awkwardly.  Although the room is not cluttered, it is claustrophobic, and Peg’s controlling presence seems to suck any warmth out of the room – even the sun struggles to get through the sheer curtain.

Initially, my reaction was to be excited by these quiet, empty pauses, as they seemed to suggest the importance of place in the characters lives, as well as emphasising the sameness of the place.  The shots are similar to a lot of photographs of suburbia I have seen exhibited in the past few years, composed in the most obvious, anti-art fashion in order to emphasise the banality of the place.  They are unusual in the context of this film, and at first I was seduced by their strangeness.  However, after thinking about these shots more, I am unsure how much they really add to a film where the main strengths are the strong performances.  Pace wise, they seem to create breaks rather than necessary pauses, and I think that emphasising the banality of the house can sell short the way in which the characters experience their environment.  Despite their rigid and daily existence, people live here, and even though Ashley and Johnny have personalities that clash with Peg’s clean and neat aesthetic, I think Ashley’s character probably thinks of the home as nice, and despite Peg’s smothering personality, she says of the family, ‘This is my family now.’

The most successful shots of the house and its surrounds are those which include the characters in the space.  When Ashley goes into labour, Madelaine is told by Peg to stay at the house and wait for George, while the rest of the family rushes to the hospital.  As the car drives off, Madelaine is left standing on the path beside the neat green lawn, awkwardly holding her bag.  She is tiny compared to the house and garden.  The shot then flips around to show the neighbor whom we saw earlier being snubbed by Peg standing on her own vast lawn watching Madelaine.  Eventually she turns and walks up to the house.  An equally powerful moment occurs after the family return home from the hospital after the baby’s death.  The camera rests on the unused dining room just as it did at the beginning of the film, only this time, Peg walks into the frame and sits down at the table.  Eventually she begins crying.  Watching her sob in her immaculate dining room shows well the incongruity between her outward appearance and her capacity for emotion.