Southern Film, a Pretty Picture, and Bad Cheese

Junebug - 2005 - DVD
Thursday, October 4, 2007

There are few truly "southern" films. This statement is based mostly on the two-year tutorial I had with a roommate, a southerner from Tennessee. The most glaring fault with most Hollywood fare, she always said, was the bad accent, which was not so much southern as it was "country," or "hick," a la The Beverly Hillbillies or Cletus from The Simpsons. After years of conversation about the topic, and a personal tour through middle Tennessee on a springtime road trip, I learned that she's not only right about this misrepresented culture (and accent), but that the indie gem Junebug melds perfectly with her message.

Phil Morrison's 2005 debut feature Junebug is full of contradictions, of southern characters who don't fit the backwoods mold we expect, and plenty who still do. He told the Guardian in 2006 that "Movies that claim they dispel stereotypes, all that they actually do is avoid them." Aptly put for his movie that aims to capture the cultural divide between the entire U.S. and its filial counterpart, the South, more often portrayed as our nation's clumsy appendage in hasty afterthought. Ashley Johnsten (Amy Adams) is automatically recognizable as the fluttery young woman whose world view doesn't extend farther than the county line. She's impressionable, loyal, and in love with (and impregnated by) her high school sweetheart, Johnny Johnsten (The O.C.'s Ben McKenzie).

To look at these two characters is initially alienating, because we ask how they could be real. A quick dismissal would render them unreal; it would keep them at a far enough distance to eternally keep them not so much misunderstood, but left to the wayside to never be considered at all. Junebug very simply makes us consider them and acknowledge a person like Ashley who never left her hometown, and by contrast, her new sister-in-law (Embeth Davidtz), a svelte and worldly Chicago art dealer in a town and culture she doesn't understand.

Junebug is a plain story about two unfamiliar worlds colliding, and appropriately it is framed with the same forthwith simplicity. In between scenes there are often long takes of the southern countryside: rolling green lawns, long-stretching, empty roads; and much of these are seen from the perspective of a passenger car window, meditatively looking out at a space that looks too familiar to be complex. But looks are sometimes deceiving, and Junebug is not an exception to that rule.



Shopgirl - 2005 - DVD
Saturday, October 6, 2007

What a surprising delight Steve Martin's sleeper flick from '06 was! Shopgirl has all the great humor of Martin's comedy (he wrote the screenplay and the novella on which it's adapted), but from a much calmer, more mature perspective. Clearly he has written the story of the lonely shopgirl, Mirabelle (Claire Danes), and her struggle to find a respectable boyfriend, from the view of guy who holds men suspect when it comes to their dating motives. Mirabelle's first date with the scruffy, socially awkward Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman) is a disaster of immature proportions (he proposes using a plastic baggie when the couple realize they have no condom); he's lovably earnest, but too inexperienced to acknowledge Mirabelle's complexity as a woman, her sensitivities or her personal desires. He's the pip-squeak puppy bouncing at his master Mirabelle's feet, begging the question, "Do women mature faster than guys?" But before you have a chance to answer that definitively, millionaire Ray Porter (Steve Martin), much her elder, sweeps her off her feet with fancy dinners, boxes of designer clothing, and a comfortable break from her otherwise drab life. The solution initially seems clear to Mirabelle, she's just got to date older men; perhaps Ray is even the one?

Guys never grow up, as Steve Martin has it. But immaturity, defined by indecisiveness and un-clever conversations, doesn't mean the guys out there are bad either. Essentially, Shopgirl is about the different languages of men and women and how each are in constant negotiation and interpretation of one another; that men and women will, with all inevitability, look quizzically up with a blank, "What?" from time to time. It's only when that inquiry stops that their love ends.

Jason Schwartzman deserves an Oscar for his natural and dichotomous role as an effervescent slacker with his heart on his sleeve. And cinematographer Peter Suschitzky's shots are truly a series of pictorial masterpiece.


I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With - 2007 - Film
Saturday, October 6, 2007

I wish I could express the same sentiment for Jeff Garlin's self-deprecating first feature film, I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With. High points include him in a small stint dressed as a pirate mascot peddling hot dog samples, and his comical co-stars Bonnie Hunt and Sarah Silverman; but in all, the sad humor of an overweight, middle-age man living at home with his mother is too depressing to be funny, and I fear too many of the fat jokes came off as an awkward comment on Garlin's own insecurities. He was in person at The Music Box Theatre last month to tell the audience about the making and financing of the film, though most of the audience questions could be summed up as such: "Is Larry David really like that?" To this he offered the consistent and patient answer, "No. I don't know if you know, but Curb Your Enthusiasm is fiction!