Tone is everything in this movie; it's not so much what people say as how they say it, and why. Consider this dialogue:
Peg: "You comin' to bed?"
Eugene: "Not now. I'm looking for something. My Phillips head."
That much is exactly right. A certain kind of person (my father was one) finds a Phillips head screwdriver easier to lose than almost everything else. So now wait until it's later at night, and observe Eugene in the kitchen. He looks in the refrigerator and then he says: "Now where would I be if I was a screwdriver?"
If you get that right, you get everything else right, too. And here is other dialogue that rings with clarity and truth:
Ashley to Johnny: "God loves you just the way you are, but he loves you too much to let you stay that way."
Peg, under her breath at a baby shower, after her son's new wife from the city has given her daughter-in-law a silver spoon: "That won't go in the dishwasher."
Who are these people? The story begins in Chicago, where an art dealer named Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz) is holding a benefit for Jesse Jackson Jr. At the event she meets George (Alessandro Nivola), and they fall in love and get married. His family from North Carolina is invited but doesn't attend. Six months later, she learns of a folk artist named David Wark (Frank Hoyt Taylor) who lives near George's family in the Winston-Salem area. They decide to kill two birds with one stone: She'll sign up the artist and meet the family.
Here is the family she meets: Peg (Celia Weston) is the matriarch, who criticizes everyone, second-guesses every decision and is never wrong, according to her. Eugene (Scott Wilson) is her husband, who has withdrawn into a deep silence and a shadowy presence, and spends many hours in his basement wood-carving corner. Johnny (Ben McKenzie) is George's younger brother, newly married to his high school sweetheart, Ashley (Amy Adams). She is pregnant.
As George and Madeleine arrive, Ashley is about to give birth. Johnny is responding to this, as he does to everything, by withdrawing, not talking to anybody, working under his car in the garage. Ashley, on the other hand, is always chatty; she's a good soul, cheerful, optimistic, supportive. The four people in this household are so locked into their roles that the arrival of the Chicagoans is like a bomb dropping.
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