Rumpus at the Movies

Junebug's occasional pretentiousness -- long, soundless shots of empty rooms and self-consciously sterile suburban landscapes -- is offset by an occasional thoughtfulness and a few sincere gestures. It's the story of Madeleine, a sophisticated art gallery owner and exhibitor of "visionary" art who travels with her shiny new husband, George, whom she has married after a one-week courtship, to his hometown in North Carolina in order to convince a "visionary" Southern artist named David Wark -- reminiscent of one of Flannery O'Connor's "grotesques" -- to exhibit his works at her gallery. Since they happen to be in town, the newlyweds spend a few days with the husband's moderately dysfunctional down-home family. It's an earnest and sometimes affecting film that attempts to present its culture-clash theme without pandering to urban, liberal preconceptions about Southern culture or patronizing its Southern characters. Despite the vague suggestion, however, that Madeleine is in her own way as provincial as any of George's family members, and despite the implication that Madeleine's admiration for the drawling, exotic, anti-Semitic Wark represents an absurd orientalizing of North Carolina culture, I'm not sure that the film finally succeeds in the attempt. I suspect, for instance, that the critical acclaim that attended Amy Adams's performance as the very pregnant and pathologically chatty sister-in-law, Ashley, arises from exactly the kind of "aww, bless their little hearts, aren't these Southern types quirky and fascinating?" impulse that drives Madeleine's over-estimation of Wark's art. I wouldn't mind the ambiguity of the film's end, except that the crucial character of George is so underwritten that what might have been an enriching ambiguity plays more like a slamming of the door in the audience's face. Still, I can't quite get a handle on the movie, and I'm sounding harsher in my assessment of it than I really felt while watching it. It's an interesting and often appealing movie. I'm just not sure whether it succeeded in fully fleshing out its vision and its themes.

Junebug was sort of an indie incarnation of Sweet Home Alabama, an engaging piece of mainstream fluff whose similarities with Junebug -- far from causing me to lower my estimation of Junebug -- has caused me to raise my estimation of Sweet Home Alabama.

I watched Mahattan on Turner Classics the other night, and it was another one of those "when I was a child, I thought as a child" experiences I've been having lately. I used to think Manhattan was one of Woody Allen's best movies, and I still admire Gordon Willis's magnificant black and white cinematography and the lush Gershwin soundtrack. But my goodness, this movie is populated by some of the most insufferable, self-absorbed, pretentious, and morally vacuous characters in moviedom. I suppose when I was younger their self-consciousness made them interesting to me -- maybe because I mistook self-consciousness for self-knowledge. This time, however, they just seemed distasteful and pathetic, and -- try as I might -- I couldn't take the last scene as an indictment of Woody Allen's character. It still has a few funny lines, but those count for less than they used to once the characters begin to seem less like interestingly screwed-up but nevertheless witty urbanites and more like sad clowns costumed in Ralph Lauren instead of big red noses and floppy shoes.

The Lives of Others is superb. I always have a harder time articulating unequivocal admiration for a movie than I have quibbling and nit-picking, so maybe I should just leave it at that. I don't have enough time, at the moment, to praise it thoughtfully.