Junebug

Junebug, a film by Phil Morrison

Last night, Roger and I rented Junebug, a story about a recently married Chicago couple who go down to North Carolina to visit the husband's middle-class family and to see an eccentric artist whom the wife, an art gallery owner, is trying to sign for her gallery.

I really enjoyed the story, the mood conveyed in the film, and the characters. It was a great study of sudden relationships, as in meeting your in-laws for the first time, trying to like them, but not get in their way - wanting to belong, but also recognizing how you don't. I'm not being very eloquent in describing the film.

There's an excellent "Director's Statement" on the film's website that does a better job of stating the film's intention:

I've never had that feeling of "this story must be told." That's sort of a prose-based inspiration, I guess, and thank God people have it. I've been inspired more by moments, or by phenomena, in movies. ... Just a couple of transcendent moments are enough to make a movie worthwhile to me; and if there are more, and they work together in some mysterious way to create the moral-mystical-delirious experience that's unique to movies, then I'm inspired.

I like that sensibility, that approach to storytelling. I think that is what I find in storytellers like John Cheever, Alice Munro, and most recently in an old story by John Updike, "Here Come the Maples."

Phil Morrison goes on to write:

JUNEBUG is meant to explore the difficulty created by relationships based on patronage, however well meaning. For instance, one idea that arose is that such relationships glorify the peculiar, and convince us to view what is common as "cliche." It was not at all my intention to avoid cliches, but rather to try to explore what it is about a particular thought, object, phrase, etc. that so raises my hackles that I declare it "cliche."