Junebug: Another Time Amy Adams Enchanted Us

With Enchanted currently sprinkling its fairy-tale dust on moviegoers, after debuting at No. 1 at the box office and carrying Hollywood almost single-handedly through the Thanksgiving holiday, its star Amy Adams has stepped into that gazillion-watt Klieg light we assign to "America's Sweetheart." And although Adams is too smart, versatile and serious an actor to seem entirely comfortable wearing the America's Sweetheart sash, I admit that it's nice to see such an appealing and careful actor, not to mention one who's out of her twenties, get that sort of attention.

Whether or not she'll eventually be trading war stories with Jennifer Aniston is anyone's guess, but for now she can enjoy both the celebrity and the well-deserved opportunities we can already foresee opening up for her. This December she headlines Charlie Wilson's War alongside Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Then to kick-start 2008 she'll share some comedic screen time with Frances McDormand in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.

There's no doubt that Enchanted is exposing Adams to the largest audiences of her career so far. But it's not the first -- or even the best -- vehicle that has brought her to our screens, both large and small. For new fans and the casually curious alike, DVDs that show us Adams' work before Enchanted are easy to come by. For one thing, there aren't a lot of them. The high-profile titles are few: her first feature role in the teen beauty pageant satire Drop Dead Gorgeous, a head-turning performance as the naive candy-striper who marries Leonardo DiCaprio in Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, and Will Ferrell's "animal noises" hookup in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. She also made episodic appearances in TV series such as That 70's Show, Providence, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, The West Wing, Smallville and The Office. (On a much smaller scale, you can spot her just being herself attending Stephen Tobolowsky's Birthday Party.)

But her first major attention-getter came in 2005 with her portrayal of a chatty Southern darling, and the film's emotional center, in Junebug. It's a performance that brought Adams far-ranging and serious-minded acclaim, including a Special Jury Prize for Acting at the Sundance Film Festival, the award for Best Supporting Actress from the National Society of Film Critics, a tie with Brokeback Mountain star Michelle Williams for Best Supporting Actress at the Broadcast Film Critics' Choice Awards, an Indie Spirit Award, and "Best Supporting" nominations from both the Screen Actors Guild and the 2005 Academy Awards. Junebug is available on DVD, and for anyone wondering what this new Sweetheart is capable of, I recommend it with enthusiasm the way you might thrust a favorite book or slice of pie into the hands of a like-minded friend.

Junebug is a dramatic comedy wrapped around a simple theme: Family happens. Worldly and urbane newlywed Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz) travels from her highbrow Chicago art gallery to meet her new in-laws in North Carolina. Her primary objective is to secure an exclusive contract with an "outsider artist" (Frank Hoyt Taylor) producing hallucinogenic folk paintings near her husband George's boyhood home, not far from Winston-Salem, N.C. Like a backwoods William Blake, the dialect-heavy and mentally off-kilter artist exists not entirely on our plane. Admiring his vision of the Battle of Antietam, Madeleine says, "I love all the dog heads and computers and scrotums." But she's convinced that he, as her "discovery," is destined to become an art-scene smash. She married George (Alessandro Nivola) only one week after meeting him at a Chicago art auction, so their side trip to his family home forces the couple to see each other in terms not yet tested in their sexually passionate relationship. Madeleine blithely cheek-kisses her way through George's rural kin, oblivious to the simple complexities of communication, engagement and expectations that can make or doom all such encounters.

Junebug could have taken that setup and troweled on easy yuks from some Sweet Home Alabama Meets the Fockers bucket, with pickup trucks and guys named Beau or Skeeter. Fortunately, everyone involved here is more knowing, honest and trusting than that. This is a measuredly comic South not of Jeff Foxworthy, but a suburban Lost in Translation by way of Flannery O'Connor, where folks eating spaghetti hot dish at a church social can more freely reveal themselves than those at a wine-and-cheese soiree in a cosmopolitan art gallery. The cultures don't clash, really, but they do scrape the chrome off each other's fenders.

Unhurried and subdued with a free-floating focus and tone, this is one of those spare, ruminative indies where plot isn't so much a straight line as a collection of small, soft dots. As an ensemble showcase for its acting talent, it's a master class in beautifully written and played understatement. The family's center of gravity is matriarch Peg (Celia Weston), who regards Madeleine as if George had brought home a being from Alpha Centauri. As George's brother Johnny, Benjamin McKenzie (TV's The O.C.) bottles the pent up hostility of a high-school dropout bitter in George's shadow and with a wife nine months pregnant. That would be Ashley (Adams), a flighty chatterbox who idolizes sophisticated Madeleine with child-eyed ebullience. The disconnect between Madeleine and George's family (and Madeleine and George) reaches its harshest test when Madeleine must choose between a career-making opportunity and a family crisis involving Ashley.

A lot of glasses have been raised to Adams' ambrosial charm in a funny and achingly tender performance. Sure enough, joy-touched Ashley makes Junebug worthwhile all by herself. Adams really is splendid, delivering one of the year's most enjoyable performances through surprising subtleties and layers, earning every inch of those awards and nominations.

That said, another actor also worth calling out from this all-over excellent ensemble is Scott Wilson, who plays George's acutely taciturn father Eugene. Wilson, who began his career as one of the killers in In Cold Blood, makes choices that are the polar opposite of Adams' giddy, uninhibited Ashley. Eugene's immobile, pinched-lipped, hands-in-pockets quietude gives us a stealth performance that's more impressive than any action hero.

Director Phil Morrison's first feature returned him to Winston-Salem, where he was born. With Junebug he displays a confidence made sharper by his monkish restraint. He brings to the material an eye for resonant metaphors and ambiguities, as well as, thank you, a knack for elaborating the idiosyncrasies of this fragile family and where they live without coming off as classist or mocking. (Those of us raised in this flavor of the South likely recognize, and appreciate, the film's delicate authenticities more than viewers from elsewhere.) Playwright-turned-screenwriter Angus MacLachlan, a graduate from the North Carolina School of the Arts drama program, has a tuning-fork ear for the dialogue. Together they sculpted these characters out of native clay, and then with his actors Morrison pared them down, down, down to an atomized level of judiciously exposed revelations.

The result is a concatenation of scenes that place much of the telling in their ellipses. For some viewers, this less-is-more approach will leave too much information off-screen. George, for instance, is so far in the background that he abandons his wife, and the rest of the film, until his cue comes near the end. Junebug risks feeling like the common notion of a New Yorker-style novelette: a meticulously crafted, lovingly realized character study of someone doing the dishes. On the other hand, one of many reasons to love Junebug is how often it offers us spaces to fill in ourselves, the faith it shows in handing us small puzzles -- Eugene's hand-carved bird, for instance -- to chuckle over or think on afterward.

Sony's DVD edition of Junebug brings the film home with a generous selection of extras that do a better job of giving us a behind-the-scenes experience than most prefab "making of" featurettes that are more scripted and budget-showy. Amy Adams and Embeth Davidtz get the commentary track, so we eavesdrop on their dialogue covering production memories scene by scene, their processes of developing their characters and personal thoughts on their director, their cast mates, the terrific Yo La Tengo soundtrack and -- most candidly -- themselves. It's lightweight and pleasant enough, and isn't stuffy or over-prepared.

Ten deleted or extended scenes (about 20 minutes total) frequently come in the form of workprint takes revealing alternate variations of a scene. It's a shame that one lovely scene between Peg and Eugene was cut, but we're glad to have it here. Five short promo junket clips focus on the Winston-Salem locations and local actors, then on actors Nivola, McKenzie, Adams and Weston discussing their character work. "Casting Sessions" is raw audition footage of Adams and McKenzie presenting varying approaches to key scenes. A photo gallery of the Outsider Art provide an up-close look at the bizarre paintings created for the film.

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