Juno (2007)

Juno (Ellen Page) loses her virginity to her best friend Paulie (Michael Cera) in an opening scene of surprising tenderness. Evidently they weren’t too careful, as Juno soon finds herself pregnant, and looking for parents to take the child she knows she’s not equipped to raise. She tells her parents, (J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney, both sharp in small roles) and they react with understanding and good humor, a reaction that I’m sure many accidentally impregnated teens pray their parents will have as they consider how to best break the news.

Taken as a fantasy in which babies are nothing more than a roommate with a nine month lease, Juno largely works. The pregnancy is, barring the occasional scene, the macguffin. The film isn’t interested in the pregnancy’s affect on Juno’s parents, or Paulie, or Paulie’s parents (who are curiously sidelined, I’m assuming they never know to begin with), it is merely a means to inspiring an intelligent, insecure, relentlessly self-aware girl to recognize that she isn’t Queen of the World, and that her humor, which she uses as a bludgeon, can be off putting and mean. Like many young people of both genders, Juno can be as casually awful as the people she thinks she’s protecting herself against. This realization is the movie. I actually had a bit of a hard time accepting that, because the film, regardless of what you’ve heard, is not a farce. The film is ambitious and serious enough to expect a bit of owning up on the part of director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody in regards to the unborn child. Like Juno herself, Juno is a young person’s movie, created by young people, it’s insecure and unsure of itself, and that’s both the best and worst thing about the movie.

Worst for the reason I just described, best because the film’s rambuctiousness is surprisingly human. Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner portray the adoptive parents to be, and, of course, they are rich and live a certain facade that the arrival of a child threatens to crumble. But their crumbling is the best part of the movie, and that’s because Cody, when she’s not striving to be the hippest thirty year old screenwriter in the room, has surprising imagination. Garner is immediately expected to be the shrill harpy of the duo, but her character is more, and less, than that. Self-awareness is not, refreshingly, reserved for just the under twenty set in Juno. Garner catches the fear, the resentment in her husband’s looks, and the heartbreaker is that she agrees with his assessment of her.

Bateman and, especially, Garner needed this movie. I’ve never thought Garner had the stuff to be a movie star, and honestly I still don’t. But she has the stuff of an actress, at least here. Garner might be the best performance in the film, and this is a film where the performances unquestionably deliver. Bateman’s a bit of the opposite, he’s definitely a star, but I was never sure if he was quite an actor. As Bateman reemerged into feature films, it seemed to me that his very appealing Michael Bluth might be the only note he had in him. Juno doesn’t really refute this suspicion, but it illustrates a darker, subtler, less sentimental key* of that note.

Which brings us to Juno herself, and her maybe/maybe not mate, Paulie. Ellen Page was terrific in the unwatchably sanctimonious Hard Candy a few years prior, and her work here is similar. Like Bateman she’s unsentimental and even more committed. Yes, Juno is armed with a never ending arsenal of annoying MySpace double speak, but the film acknowledges it for the stunt that it is. Have you folks ever actually read a MySpace profile? The self-justifying through obscure musical, filmic and literary name dropping, the cross breeding of insults into something you can barely understand, there are plenty of little women like this running around, sure, it’s stylized, but, guys, that’s what we at least sometimes go to the movies for. Cody does try too hard though, and will hopefully realize that a little goes a long way, and that her less explicable jokes are more effective (there’s a Woody Allen reference early in the film that slayed me.)

Cera is Cody, Reitman, and Page’s secret weapon, the redemption of the snark. He’s the cost of Juno’s bullshit, the jarringly raw nerve young man who’s even more lived in than Page. Like his Arrested Development alum, Bateman, Cera was in danger of boring me. I get it. Cera does his thing extremely well, but I get it. Well I don’t get it, or at least I haven’t had enough yet. Cera, again like Bateman, doesn’t stretch so much as refine and slightly re-contextualize. Cera’s work is simple and poignant, the personification of the unmasked adoration that Juno believes to be out of her reach.

Reitman could’ve laid off a little on the self-congratulatory sound track, but he’s learned a bit from his first film, the overrated, have it both ways Thank You for Smoking. This film is just as blunt, but it moves and shakes more comfortably, more organically, than Smoking. Juno is a bit of a pain in the ass, but you really can’t help but at least partially like the damn thing.

*I know nothing about musical notes.

★★★

Posted on January 6th, 2008 in 2007, Reviews, Comedy |

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