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Juno
- Directed by Jason Reitman
- Written by Diablo Cody
- Starring Ellen Page
- and Michael Cera
- Classification: 14A
- Rating:
When we first meet Juno MacGuff, the 16-year-old protagonist of the comic hit Juno, she's chugging SunnyD so she can pee to take her pregnancy test again. The pharmacy clerk, played by The Office's Rainn Wilson, is not sympathetic.
"What's the prognosis, fertile Myrtle? Minus or plus?" he asks.
"There it is. That little pink plus sign is so unholy," says Juno.
"That ain't no Etch A Sketch. This is one doodle that can't be undid, home skillet," he continues.
"Silenzio, old man," says Juno (Ellen Page), who now must face up to the life-changing consequences from one afternoon's sex with a gawky friend-but-not-boyfriend, Paulie Bleeker (Superbad's Michael Cera, looming and feathery-soft in yellow headbands and too-short track pants).
Before we get to that, there's a more pressing question: Who exactly are these aliens who speak this strange banter? Turns out almost everybody in Juno, or at least all the hip people, who include the pharmacy clerk, Juno's sexy best friend and adviser Leah (Olivia Thirlby) and both of Juno's jocular and warmly supportive late-middle-aged parents, played by J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney. The script for Juno was written by Diablo Cody, who puts language in character's mouths that sounds funny and makes no sense. So Juno is the kind of utterly fictitious 16-year-old who drops knowing references to Soupy Sales and Diana Ross.
In her bedroom, talking on her hamburger-shaped phone to an abortion clinic: "Hello, I'd like to procure a hasty abortion. I'm on my hamburger phone ..." This feels like what sitcom writers do when they want to goose up an absurd visual by having the character point it out.
Icked out by the abortion clinic's pierced clerk, bad magazines and intrusive application form, Juno decides against having an abortion. When she tells her parents, they respond, naturally, with a succession of zingers.
After the first half-hour, during which the dialogue feels as shrill as an off-key high-school band, things settle down into a more familiar melody. Perhaps the best way to think of Juno is as the subjective experience of an intelligent but completely panicked teenager, spoken in the way words sound in her head.
Juno's director is Jason Reitman, who laid claim with his promising first film, Thank You for Smoking, as the apparent successor to Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways). There's nothing too original here: The setting is the anonymity of suburban Vancouver, and the Crayola colour palette and cutesy music draw inevitable comparisons to the deadpan comedy of Napoleon Dynamite or Wes Anderson's films. Reitman's antagonism to political orthodoxies is soft-pedalled but still apparent: Where else could you see a feminist-friendly, right-to-life comedy about kids who practise unsafe sex?
Not ready to abort or become a teen mother, Juno opts to answer an ad in the local PennySaver newspaper from Mark and Vanessa Loring, a rich, successful couple looking for a baby. He's a 40-ish jingle writer trying to hold onto his punk-rock youth; she's a corporate executive and desperate would-be mom. They're the first two people in the movie who speak normally, and with that the film takes on a more human dimension. The movie moves through the seasons of Juno's pregnancy, when she walks the halls of her high school feeling like a "caution whale."
As the pregnancy approaches full term, she finally has a crisis of confidence, not in her decision but about love. She has a fight with Paulie. The more she gets to know the Lorings, what was obvious in the first scene becomes more glaringly clear: They're an ill-matched couple.
One major critic has described Juno as a film that "doesn't hit a single false note," which is true only in the sense that it hits a lot of them. There's the improbable psychology and self-conscious dialogue, some unworthy jokes (the teenaged Asian anti-abortion protester who mangles English). The real reason why so many critics have fallen for Juno is because of Page (Hard Candy, The Tracey Fragments). She's adorable in a childlike way - she barely looks 16, never mind her real age of 20 - but she's also a rarity as an actress, making Cody's overstuffed dialogue sound blunt and real while suggesting the vulnerability beneath Juno's irony-clad shell.
To be fair to the script, Cody's story eventually proves deeper than its wisecracked surface initially suggests. Juno's empathy grows with her expanding belly until she begins to see that the most unhip characters in her world may know more than she thought. Jennifer Garner's neurotically antiseptic Vanessa shows she has a soul. The terminally uncool Paulie reveals he's much more tuned in than Juno suspected. And as the movie's maternal hormones kick in, things finally turn perilously sentimental in the last few scenes.
There's an aesthetic suspense to Juno that has nothing to do with its plot. The film's forced quirkiness constantly threatens to derail the entire enterprise, making this another minor American indie exercise in family eccentricity. But it keeps being put back on track by the apparently effortless performance of a great young actress.
