Juno
Some movies feel like they are going to be so quirky and precious that you instinctively brace yourself before seeing them, ready for some kind of regurgitated and safe formula to ruin what could have been a good idea. Juno is NOT that kind of movie. Ellen Page plays Juno, a high schooler whose impulse boink of her best friend (Michael Cera, atop his game as always) results in the conception and gestation of a baby. Cera I will see anything for; it’s a bonus to put him opposite this character with whom his has so much history and watch them riff with each other like seasoned jazz musicians.
Juno is nobody’s fool. She is smart, verbose, skeptical, and free-thinking. She goes through the various options and comes up with the best solution for herself honestly, clearly untouched by test marketing or studio suits breathing down her young neck. Page is crackling with what will surely be called a Jodie Fosteresque preternatural intelligence, once she gets herself in a movie more than 70 people will see. I am hoping it will be this movie. She was in Hard Candy, which I avoided on general principle, but now need to see for her.
It’s no spoiler (the poster shows her stretched and ready to drop) that she decides to give the baby up for adoption. The couple she finds (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) are adults with adult issues that Juno may not be able to see right off, but which we the audience can see with agonizing clarity. Bateman and Garner make a great onscreen couple - both in their compatibilities and their incompatibilities alike. They have an authentic vibe together even in their model-home artificial-feeling home. Garner gets a moment where she gets to widen her doe eyes and remind us that even the superwoman is a vulnerable little girl. Bateman gets to loosen his uptight perfect-dad belt from Arrested Development and show us a man who isn’t a cartoon but a real actor doing great actor things.
The story itself is pretty simple: pregnant teen copes with her condition and this couple hopes to win her approval. However, the movie is about so much more, but is not crowded by all it touches. It’s written as a personal journey for Juno and flows with the naturalness of life itself. Oh, I’m sorry, I haven’t even mentioned how laugh-out-loud funny it is! The words, the words - they are gorgeous. Older people like to pretend that teenagers don’t talk like this - but talk to a few - some of them really do. And their perspectives and naivetes are not as ours might have been 10, 20, 40 years ago. Kids are sophisticated and jaded, with endless avenues to better themselves culturally than just top 40 radio and whatever their parents expose them to. The potential calamities that Juno’s parents (J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney) feared would befall Juno that came before pregnancy is telling as well.
The movie has fun, quirky original songs, and incredibly great dialogue, but the movie itself is only “quirky” in that it is so very sincere, so realistic in its tone and approach. Writer Diablo Cody reinvented herself from a young age, and her history demanded that she approach her loved ones and life with the same honesty and bravery that Juno does. As an audience member, you can find the positive in every character, but this is no test-marketing “we have to like everyone” artificial approval. These people are flawed, but we love them anyway, just like our families and friends. Maybe in places the movie is too tidy, but it’s a nice, messy kind of tidy. Please go see it.
MPAA Rating PG-13
Release date 12/5/07
Time in minutes 91
Director Jason Reitman
Studio Fox Searchlight
