Translating Between Red and Blue

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It is this last value that Madeline--an ambitious art dealer who has viewed this family visit as a secondary priority to signing a fickle local artist--has the hardest time grasping. In one of the most wrenching scenes of the movie, after the family has suffered a tragedy, Madeline gets a ride home from the artist and his sister. Elated at having finally signed him and wanting to seal the deal, she beams and assures them, "I am so happy right now." The artist's sister turns to Madeline with a grief-stricken face and says, "I am so sorry for your family's loss." It's an awful moment. This complete stranger is better able to think of Madeline's in-laws as family than Madeline herself.

Even so, the beauty of "Junebug" is that it doesn't caricature or romanticize either side. Most viewers, I suspect, will be drawn at certain points in the movie to feel smugly superior to one or the other of the character types on screen. A few beats later, however, they will find themselves wincing at those same characters. The British-born Madeline seems out of place with her fashionable black clothes, her too-short hair, and her touchy-feely interaction with her reserved in-laws (kiss-kiss on both cheeks). But she does spend the majority of the film trying to get along with them, and does so almost entirely on her own, as George is always conspicuously absent. It's hard to deny that these efforts--while awkward--are endearing. At the same time, just as the movie seems to be presenting George's family as refreshingly simple and unpretentious, there is no denying the snobbery in the instant dislike George's mother takes to Madeline. "She's a stranger," she fumes to George's father. "No she's not," he answers. "She's family."

The most aggravating aspect of the movie is the fact that Madeline and her in-laws are placed in an unnecessarily uncomfortable situation. They muddle through and coexist for a few days, but they are like citizens from two different countries whose interpreter has run off. George clearly did not tell either side what to expect, and in the absence of that direction, they are left to fall back on preconceptions.

There is, unfortunately, no shortage of those. I watched the movie at a Washington, D.C., screening and was surprised by the number of anthropological comments I heard about the church scenes and the family, as if they were just the most quaint artifacts. Even the director, a North Carolina native who was on-hand for a discussion afterward, felt the need to point out to the audience the "unusual" fact that one of the film's local actors was both a member of his church choir and head of the local arts council. "Oof," I thought. "If this all seems odd, there's still a lot of work that needs to be done."

And that is perhaps the point of the movie. When I told Morrison that I was unsatisfied by George's abdication of his role as cultural translator, the director said that I was supposed to feel uncomfortable. The tensions and misunderstandings in the movie, he explained, are what happen when those of us with dual red/blue citizenship fail to play a mediating role as translators and cultural ambassadors. Sometimes it's as simple as standing up and saying, I'm not who you think I am--but I'm also not who you think they are. "Religious Democrat" wouldn't seem like such an oxymoron if the Georges of the world came out and identified themselves for all to see.

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