Madeleine, like many Northerners, sees the South as a peculiar yet amusing culture that merits wonder. In rural North Carolina, she courts favor with a self-taught artist who paints grotesque glories of Confederate angels and preaches bellicose reveries about Jesus Christ. She sips her cherry cola, eager to box up his visions of Antietams, Shermans and scrotums to showcase in her Chicago art gallery.
But because she and her husband of six months, George, are in this neck of the woods, they decide to visit his kin. Madeleine (Embeth Davitz) finds herself fascinated by a portrait unlike any other -- that of her own new family.
Introductions in the Johnston household are anything but picturesque. Eugene, the reticent father, simply gawks. Peg, the sullen mother, bites her tongue each time Madeleine, oblivious, calls her "Pat." Johnny, George's brother, retreats into the funny papers, recoiling from her kiss on his cheek. Ashley, Johnny's buoyant red-headed wife, bombards Madeleine with an avalanche of autobiography: she didn't make the cheerleading team, her favorite animals are meerkats, she's nine months pregnant and trying to lose weight so she ate a bun-less hotdog, she and Johnny loved each other too much to wait to graduate high school.
Flabbergasted, Madeleine replies in her British accent that she was born in Japan.
Ashley's jaw drops. "You were not!"
Junebug is a radiant story of a family's fragile union and reunion -- but it will disappoint anyone who complained that Sideways lacked "plot."
At times, Junebug may feel slow as a summer's day, as if it is holding its breath, waiting, pregnant with climax. An acceleration of action, an addition of "plot," however, would betray its essence. The film attentively listens to the cadences of a Baptist family in the heart of Southern culture. It is a poignant study in the land of Pentecostal potlucks and pregnant teenage beauty queens.
Although each actor delivers an excellent performance, Amy Adams, awarded the Sundance Special Jury Prize, eclipses her co-stars as Ashley. A child trapped in a pregnant woman's body, she hungers for Madeleine's affection and delights in playing beauty shop with her new sister-in-law. With provincial innocence, she worships Madeleine's smartness and sophistication. Glowing with naïveté, she confides that she knows her baby, whom she will name "Junebug," will snap Johnny out of his apathetic daze.
Yet it is Madeleine, a stranger in a foreign land, who learns from Ashley.
The film's refusal to embrace cardboard characters or simple stereotypes rewards its audience. Although subtle humor makes many cameos, Junebug is graced by a sadness of a family straining to endure its differences. After Eugene tells her that Madeleine is now family, Peg laments, "She's still strange. Too pretty and too smart are a deadly combination."
In a way, Junebug is its own visionary art, a family portrait of self-taught persons struggling to get along. Like folk art, its characters are full of natural imperfections and beautiful transformation. As Ashley tells Johnny, "God loves you just the way you are. But he loves you too much to let you stay that way"
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