"The wondrously humane and strangely spiritual odd-duck of a movie, Junebug, incisively gets at all that unspoken complexity existing in the spaces between family members by treating them as just that: spaces, gaps, blind spots. Family in Junebug is as aesthetically controlled as it is suffocatingly full; as warm as it is frigid. Jousting is ubiquitous: Brothers engage in unarticulated hostilities as outwardly as sisters-in-law fumblingly attempt emotional contact, and husbands and wives cut each other down with razor-sharp truth as much as they dull each others’ senses with politeness. In other words, the world in a house. How to enter upon such a simultaneously antagonistic and reassuring trunk full of decades-old angst and secret communications without seeming like a mere intruder?...More than anything, more than its oft-cited red-state/blue-state dichotomies, more than its fish-out-of-water conventions, Junebug is about the bonds of family, for better or for worse, and their propensity to morph and alter with each passing season, the need to make room for change, to allow for error, to accept transition with open arms.
What makes Junebug such a unique, even cathartic, experience, however, is its reliance on silence, not just as a mere narrative justification (many of the characters seem more than happy to not express themselves verbally) but as a visual and aural tool. Junebug straddles a fine line between realism and aestheticism—its determined mise-en-scene often gives way to almost documentary-like flights of fancy, suddenly brimming with Carolina locals, picking up on the sensorial surroundings of a church banquet-hall or a factory warehouse. There’s a fairly drastic split at play here between ceaseless chatter and contemplative quiet, and not just within the obvious differences between maddeningly with-child Ashley (Amy Adams) and her preternaturally collected brother-in-law George (Alessandro Nivola): think of how Morrison will shoot his family’s living space—at once populated by the joy of family babbling, the next moment empty, voices trailing off like the faint buzzing of flies as they exit the room and thus the camera’s frame. A succession of shots shows the now-empty house with a hush fallen over it, yet the space is still alive, breathing, cognizant, pregnant with memories.
Something familiar has become unfamiliar, made odd through what the camera is able to capture. This is Junebug’s greatest strength and what gives its mundane setting such an extraordinarily uncommon demeanor...
Morrison’s contemplative style (a thicket of backyard woods at nighttime is granted the same calm as an empty living room) keeps us constantly off-guard, a refreshing sensation in what initially seems a family comedy. Yet genre is ultimately beside the point, for Junebug coalesces as something far darker and thoughtful; if not tragic then somehow beyond feeling. The title itself refers to the film’s most gaping empty space, the place on which an entire family hangs its hopes, desires, and grief."
Michael Koresky, "Inside Out," a review of Junebug (2005) for Reverse Shot
