It's a minor miracle that America can produce two films about newly-marrieds visiting the parents as different as Meet the Fockers and Junebug within the space of just a few months. Yet Phil Morrison's debut feature is as quietly sensitive as Meet the Fockers was brash and vulgar.
The newly-weds are George (Alessandro Nivola) and Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz), a dealer in regional art. She wants to sign an eccentric, faux naïf small-town painter who lives not far from where George grew up in North Carolina.
So they take the opportunity to travel down and introduce her to the parents. She is pretty, charming and nervily polite to George's fractured family.
Many directors might have caricatured the downmarket relatives: there is the prickly mother (Celia Watson), the taciturn husband (Scott Wilson), their innocently garrulous and heavily pregnant daughter (Amy Adams) and her psychotically aggressive husband ( Benjamin McKenzie).
But though we are encouraged at first to laugh at the four of them, Morrison and his excellent writer, Angus McLachlan, subtly reveal that when push comes to shove, the working-class family is quite as admirable as the highly intelligent, middle-class Madeleine.
Morrison develops his characters with a skilful eye for psychological detail and shoots his film with a quiet and often almost Bressonian feel for the suburban landscape. The performances are spot on.
Perhaps the true heroine of this exceptional film is not Davidtz, intensely as she plays, but Amy Adams as the pregnant daughter. She is a marvel, edging towards parody but never, ever tipping over.
She lights up every scene she's in. If she starts off in awe of the cleverer Madeleine, it is Madeleine who in the end admires her.
Some may find Junebug slow. But it is too intelligent and perceptive to be questioned on style and pace. It's special because it looks into these people's lives with a rare and unpatronising feeling for them.
Junebug
Cert: 15
