Muted cultural clash, when a Chicago gallery dealer (Embeth Davidtz) drags her new husband (Alessandro Nivola) back to his Carolina roots so she can woo a modestly obscene "outsider" artist ("I love all the dogs' heads, and computers, and all the scrotums") and, secondarily, so she can meet his family: churchy folk suspicious of a different type of outsider. Her blockhead brother-in-law doesn't take kindly to her efforts to help him with his paper on Huckleberry Finn ("Did you think it was funny?" "No, I thought it was long"), and her mother-in-law sizes her up as all wrong ("She's too pretty, she's too smart, and that's a deadly combination"), and her father-in-law keeps himself to himself. Only the kin by marriage, a non-sequitur motormouth nine months pregnant, lays out the welcome mat: a showy role for Amy Adams, if a tad condescending, a hand-me-down Dixie ditz. The first feature of Phil Morrison exhibits several of the most basic "indie" indicators: a milky, diluted image; too-quiet, unatmospheric sound; a character-driven storyline that's more drifting than actually driven. There's a nice scene at the church social when the interloper finds out, to her amazement, that her husband is prized for his hymn singing, but there's no followup to it, not so much as a what-the-hell. With Benjamin McKenzie, Celia Weston, and Scott Wilson. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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