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film: Junebug
director: Phil Morrison
cast: Allessandro Nivola, Embeth Davidtz, Amy Adams
Sony Picture Classics / 2005 / 107 min
score: 78
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by Tim Mathiesen
When cultures or traditions collide, it often makes for an amusing, yet, enlightening spectacle.
Recently, some great films have been based on situations, such as this. “Lost in Translation”
showed the amusing communication between American and Japanese cultures.
“State & Main” brought a Hollywood production team into a slow-paced small town.
This has been a theme in past within, not only, film, but literature and music, as well.
One of my favorite books, My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potak portrays a Jewish artist struggling
with acceptance in the traditional Hasidic Jewish culture. Tom Waits recently wrote a song, titled
“Big in Japan,” bringing to light how an artist could be practically unknown in his home
country but could be well accepted in a foreign culture.
The theme on the surface of the film, “Junebug” may be the simple clash of cultures, but what
“Junebug” ended up doing so beautifully is convicting me of my presupposed view of a successful
marriage. “Junebug” is the story of the brief homecoming of a son, George (Allessandro Nivola)
from Chicago where he fell in love and married a gallery owner named Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz).
The intellectual difference between the couple and the small-town family is the initial amusement.
Madeleine seems to be well educated and has a hard time relating to George’s family. George’s brother
reacts in a defensive manner as he blames the couple of acting arrogantly.
The love between the Madeleine and George seems strong as they are constantly holding and kissing each
other in public, while the wives of George’s father and brother watched longingly. As the film progresses
and the young couple struggle with the colliding cultures, we see the shift in perspective as we notice
that they are distant in the understanding of each other but close in a shallow, physical manner.
We also notice small gestures by the George’s father and brother towards their wives that show a
deeper love than merely physical desire. This began to shift my opinion on which couple had the
stronger love for each other and which love would most likely last longer, and hopefully forever.
The love between each of the couples was different and each one had their battles and problems
that needed to be dealt with, but the subtle shift that the film follows shows that none of us
can ever truly know another couple’s love for each other. Different experiences and circumstances
can show various weaknesses in a marriage and how a couple deals with them, fixable or not, will
determine the future of that relationship.
Our society tends to look at relationships from the outside as we watch celebrities live their
married lives. Magazines and television will report on our beloved celebrity marriages and rate
the strength of those marriages on visibale signs as they see the couples together. This is
understandable since the media, thank goodness, can not necessarily report on the hearts and minds
of those couples. As our country watches them live their married lives, and our own daily lives
get busier and busier, we really don't have time to live our love lives through our mind and heart.
In turn, it does tend to get shallowly physical. We see it on television and read it in magazines
as celebrities become a model for our lives. We fill the time we have in our marriage with quick
fixes and forget that the true bond in marriage is a friendship and full understanding of the other
person. This takes time and effort. As I have heard several pastors suggest: We need to prioritize
the time with our family in a way that it will never get pushed out of our life by other activities
and projects.
If we can keep the time with our family sacred, our marriages will last as we had promised in
our wedding vows: ‘Til death do us part.
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