dir: Jason Reitman
2007
Because, you know, there aren't enough goddamn babies in my life
already...
It only seems to me like everything's coming up babies at the moment,
because, prior to becoming a father myself, I guess I used to ignore
the ubiquity of babies, bloody babies everywhere. Almost every form of
advertising and cutesiness abounds with images of goddamn babies.
Where once breasts and overly-ripe glossy lips tried to sell us
everything from cars to nuclear reactors on the telly-o-vision, now
babies sell everything from lettuce to morning-after pills.
And in my most beloved of art forms, the movies, babies are always a
way of guaranteeing tears from even the most cynical. Yes, that
includes me.
They're always around, ever present, just waiting to appear and fuck
up people's lives at the drop of a hat.
Not my life, of course. I love being a dad. But the protagonist of
Juno, being a 16-year-old girl, isn't ready for the ticking time bomb
in her womb. And thus we are subjected to 90 minutes in the life of a
Minnesotan teenager on the road to popping out a little one.
She is ever so quirky, ever so witty, ever so irritating. But
irritating, if you like that kind of thing, in a good way. She's
always trying to make a clever quip, and often it comes out sounding
lame, and really does nothing more than highlight her own
insecurities.
Juno (Ellen Page) has sex once with Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), and
is now pregnant. She contemplates abortion, but eventually changes her
mind because she hears about the fact that her 8-week embryo has
fingernails.
She perpetually speaks in mangled-up pop culture references far beyond
her age and paygrade, but she mostly manages to pull it off. It does
make you wonder how an alleged 15 - 16 year old has had the time to
accumulate all these affectations and allusions. Also, lacking a big
brother or sister, you wonder why she's banging on about bands like
The Stooges or Mott the Hoople to a guy in his 30s (Jason Bateman).
Still, she is the construction of stripper/screenwriter Diablo Cody,
presumably based on herself growing up in the 80s, so it's not a
completely disconcerting set of events. Though, stuff like the
preciousness of having a character talk on a phone that looks like a
hamburger, talking to someone and telling them about the difficulties
of using the hamburger phone, are almost too precious to stomach.
Her father and step-mother (the always great J.K Simmons and Alison
Janney) are disappointed, but not overly incensed. Clearly Juno has
had a lot of slack cut her way for most of her life, so they seem
okay, if not comfortable, with her solution to all their problems.
Juno decides that she will carry the child to term, but that she's
unequipped to be a mother at this early stage of her life. Thus the
option of adoption is put on the table. She finds a couple that seems
willing and able, in that the control freak wife Vanessa (the always
hungry-looking Jennifer Garner) is practically explosive with
eagerness. But her husband Mark (Bateman) seems less eager. In fact,
living as he does as a stranger in his own house, relegated to a small
room for his pursuits, a child seems like the last thing he might want
in this world.
Juno is billed as a comedy, but it really isn't much of one. Sure
there are a few laughs, but there are about as many laughs in
Schindler's List. Many of Juno's lines fall flat, and I don't think
that hurts the film. It shows, if nothing else, that her motor-mouth
and snarky attitude hides fear and vulnerability. In concert with her
possible chemistry with perpetual adolescent-but-adult Mark, since
they bond over music and horror films (arguing over Dario Argento
versus Herschell Gordon Lewis, which I think is a non-starter since
they're both hacks), there's also her realisation that she may be in
love with the baby's father.
She seems to be okay with the idea of giving up the child, but still
has moments where it looks like she is bonding with the unborn
hellspawn. All the usual stuff about getting bigger and heavier and
needing stretchier pants is there, and the baby-kicks and all the
other clich=E9s that warm the cockles and the sub-cockles of the heart.
That kind of stuff is unavoidable. Childbirth is the one universal
that we all share, since death hasn't come to us yet, and not everyone
pays taxes. And it all generally goes the same way. But the movie
manages not to bathe in mawkishness or the kind of sentimental
gooeyness that is demanded of these kinds of outings.
You might like her, you might be profoundly irritated by her, but she
is an interesting character. I don't feel, unlike a shitload of other
filmgoers and critics, that this flick is anywhere near that
wonderful, or that Page's performance is that much of a stretch for
her, since she essentially played the same character in Hard Candy
(without the castration scene, unfortunately). She's not that
different from Enid in Ghost World or any other sassy, sarcastic
teenager who doesn't play the popularity game at school, which is the
majority of main characters in any flicks dealing with teens. They're
the interesting characters, after all; at least that's what the makers
of those kinds of movies want us to think.
The popular kids are always empty-headed and shallow, but the tortured
outsiders have depths, intelligence, creativity, and always show up
the popular kids in the end.
That's more of a fantasy than Buffy: The Vampire Slayer in its
entirety.
Juno's not popular anyway, but she becomes even less so throughout her
pregnancy. Pregnancy is never easy, especially for the guys that have
to hear about it all the time, but Juno's most hurtful realisation
during hers is that two people in a relationship don't always get to
together, even when everything else seems right.
Initially, like Juno, we're supposed to see the Mark character in the
same light that she does, and then perhaps we're supposed to condemn
him once he makes a particular decision. I've got to say, the alleged
arrested development that he's supposed to represent has the opposite
effect on me. To mine eyes he's probably the only sympathetic
character in the whole shebang, the only one whose motivations are
believable and who isn't drowning either in cutesiness or coolness.
Maybe it's only in comparison, but the Vanessa character to me seems
like the last person I would give my baby to if I had to. Her anal
retentiveness and her fixation on getting a baby at all costs made it
look to me as if she wanted the baby so much she'd eat it once she got
a hold of it. And considering how hungry Jennifer Garner always looks,
you know, it's a possibility.
The laughs are few and far between, and the tweeness of the soundtrack
really got on my nerves, until of course the sweetness of the film and
the disarming faux-childishness of the music won me over. It sounds
like a soundtrack put together by a Daniel Johnson savant/retard/
hipster, but does feature the hottest band with the coolest name, the
Moldy Peaches, who I've liked ever since their classic song Who's Got
the Crack?
Who, indeed, has got the crack.
Look, you already know the outcome before you step in the theatre, and
you will have forgotten most of what happened (except maybe for the
constant images of teenage guys running around, or Alison Janney's
abuse of an ultrasound technician) even as you're stepping out of the
theatre. But it's not a horrible way to spend 90 minutes.
It's not the most productive use of your time either. Get out there
and do something useful. For once.
Sandro - 6 times Ellen Page needs to stop playing the same character
in every movie she does out of 10
--
"You should've gone to China, you know, 'cause I hear they give away
babies like free iPods. You know, they pretty much just put them in
those t-shirt guns and shoot them out at sporting events." - Juno
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