Dear Diary: Come Home
On Sunday, I rented two film titles that seem to go together in my mind, and discovered that I’m not the only one: on each DVD, the final preview before the feature is the other movie.
It was only when I watched these movies that I remembered why I wanted to see them again. Junebug: Amy Adams and Alessandro Nivola. I don’t think that I knew who either of them were when I saw Junebug the first time. Thumbsucker: Tilda Swinton and Walter Kirn. Walter Kirn isn’t in Thumbsucker, of course; he wrote the novel on which it is based. (He is in Up in the Air, though, even though he’s not credited — I’m sure that he is! I’m probably wrong, though, since IMDb never misses these things. What’s this? Walter Kirn is in Thumbsucker. But that’s not why I wanted to see it.)
I remembered the atmosphere of Junebug fairly well, but I wasn’t sure that I’d seen Thumbsucker before until it started — the old names-and-faces problem.
Considering the number of DVDs that I own, and the rashness with which I acquire new ones, it might seem odd that neither of these pictures is in my library. It didn’t seem odd to me though, as I sat through them a second time. Thumbsucker is something of a bad dream, and Junebug is a nightmare.
Thumbsucker begins, for me, when Justin (Lou Pucci) gets the acceptance letter from NYU. It ends about five minutes later, with the credits. Most of the film is an exercise in throat-clearing, and that seems to be the point: isn’t America’s throat interesting? And isn’t Oregon beautiful! Although I like almost everyone in the very strong cast, nobody does much of anything that’s interesting. (Tilda Swinton is interesting just sitting in a chair, but she’s so much more exciting in The Deep End that the unavoidable comparison makes Thumbsucker seem very flat.) Poor Lou Pucci, with that lanky hair, bears an unsettling resemblance to Tippy Walker, the poor little rich girl in The World of Henry Orient.
Junebug also has a very strong cast, but it’s also put to great use. Amy Adams, Celia Weston, Alessandro Nivola — all wonderful. Embeth Davidtz is really luminous as the international sophisticate (“I was born in Japan.”) for whom central North Carolina is just another exotic location. I missed this the first time. I imagined that her character, Madeleine couldn’t stand being in her new husband’s family home, and must be dying to get back to Chicago. But Madeleine has seen stranger places, and she knows how to take a deep breath, somehow assured that she’ll be home soon enough. I must think of her the next time I’m in an unaccustomed setting. (It won’t do any good; I’m massively uncomfortable wherever I can’t speak freely.)
But the Junebug act that fascinated me earlier this evening was Ben McKenzie. I have no idea why. His character, Johnny Johnsten, is nasty little cracker in the making, an overflowing toilet of sullen resentment and off-loaded blame. He has made his mind up to be defeated, and at some point this will make him dangerous. How Mr McKenzie managed to make Johnny cutely pathetic and warmly funny, I have no idea. Perhaps he reminded me of someone I knew in Texas.
And then there was that hymn, “Come Home,” that Mr Nivola’s character is persuaded to sing at a church supper. This time, I got the hymn, too.