Movies from 2005

Sometimes I miss movies when they hit the theaters, and because my video-rental habits tend toward films released a decade or more ago, I don’t tend to catch up quickly. So it is that I only just now managed to see both Junebug and The Forty Year Old Virgin.

They’re both wonderful, clever movies, in their own ways—Virgin, a loving send-up of raucous, ridiculous guy culture, with all of its odd obsessions and insecurities, Junebug, an eerie, minor-key story about family and the South.

As far as I’m concerned, Virgin is a sweeter, more mainstream update of Swingers, albeit in a slightly nerdier milieu. They’re both movies about the perpetual male drive for female conquest set against the raunchy, alcohol-infused, pop-culture obsessed world of male friendships. And they’re both essentially romantic comedies made from a guy’s perspective. In fact, most of the gross-out romantic comedy genre that we’ve seen evolve from There’s Something About Mary to The Wedding Crashers can be described this way. Virgin and Swingers are far more subtle than the rest, but they’re all more or less Julia Roberts movies—or, on the lower end, Jennifer Lopez movies—made for the ESPN set. Last summer’s The Break-Up tried to split the difference between the genders, and didn’t fall entirely on its face, but didn’t exactly succeed either.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of it, but it’s interesting that these guy-centric romantic comedies tend to have (or are at least perceived to have) more of a crossover audience and are generally thought to be much better movies, just in terms of cinematic quality, than their female-centric counterparts. With very few exceptions, the Julia Roberts movies and their many imitators have been largely yawned at by critics—not always trashed, but rarely much praised. Whereas even a film like Wedding Crashers—which was crudely funny and genial, but hardly great—gets a lot of fairly strong reviews.

While on this subject, I should point out that When Harry Met Sally, despite sometimes being perceived as a chick-flick, is without a doubt the best romantic comedy ever, and in no small part because it so perfectly balances the male and the female viewpoints. (And please do not try to tell me that Annie Hall should get the top spot; it’s a better movie, but it’s a different genre, a relationship comedy rather than a romantic comedy. Romantic comedies are all about the couple getting either together or back together; relationship comedies are about the entirety, or a large swath of, the relationship experience.)

But on to Junebug, which is, well… I’m not quite certain, actually, except that, as a kid who grew up in the South who has both a fondness and a distaste for the region, several of the scenes struck me as intensely accurate—and thus intensely creepy, or at least squirm-inducing. I think the most surprising thing was how well the film managed to present the South both as a strange and unsettling place, almost a foreign country within the U.S., and also a warm, generous, and perfectly normal place, one where, if you're from there, you could never think of life being any other way.

And it's that tension, between the the strange and unknown and the traditional and familiar--that pushes the film, built on so much uncertainty, forward. It’s really a lovely picture, quiet, clever in a way that isn’t designed to draw attention to itself, yet it’s also frustrating, both in what it tells us and what it refuses to tell. Why, aside from the obvious physical attraction, are Madeleine and George together? Why does Madeleine put up with George’s family—and why, for that matter, does George? How did George, who inherited much of his father’s slowness and shyness with words, make it out of the small, Southern town to begin with? The film takes pains to humanize its Southern characters, but it also doesn’t paint them as any less difficult, ornery, or just plain messed-up as they really are. David Edelstein’s Slate review is the one to read here, and he’s nearly as perplexed as I am—but he, just as I do, thinks it’s something kind of wonderful anyway.