Juno

But I made up my mind, I’m keeping my baby

2007

Review: January 25, 2007

Director: Jason Reitman

Starring: Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, Allison Janney, J.K. Simmons

Not needed.

THE SETUP:

Pregnant 16-year-old decides to keep her baby and give it to a nice couple.

DISCUSSION:

This is one of those movies that always looked fairly amusing and well-made, but I was quite sure I could live without. But it was a freezing day and its good word-of-mouth had spread to my friend, and that was enough to push me into the theater.

We begin with Ellen Page as Juno staring at an easy chair in the middle of a lawn while drinking a gallon jug of Sunny D. “Uh-oh, fatal quirkiness” one begins to think. She walks through these “quirky” animated credits while we hear “quirky” anti-folk [I just heard of that genre in an article on this movie this morning], and we start to put our anti-quirk defenses up. Luckily, the film soon counters the quirk through good writing, genuine situations, and deep characters.

For example, we find out that Juno was drinking all that Sunny D so she can pee for her pregnancy test, not because it’s just so gosh-darn adorably quirky. She’s pregnant at sixteen with a dude on the track team [Bleeker] played by Michael Cena of Arrested Development and Superbad. From the start, the movie finds ways to disarm the viewer’s potential defenses against its potential preciousness. Juno considers an abortion and decides against it not because she has some epiphany about the sanctity of human life, but because the office smells and the magazines have rings. When she tells her father and stepmother, she already has a plan to give the baby away in a closed adoption, so we avoid a big hysterical scene, and her parents don’t freak out, they just start practically planning how they’re going to handle it. So the movie keeps deftly avoiding the audience’s cynicism by playing things smarter and more sincere, and using what quirk there is to play against the seriousness of the situation.

Juno goes to meet the parents she has picked out for the child, an uptight woman, Vanessa, who desperately wants a child, played by Jennifer Garner with a depth I haven’t seen her pull off before, and Jason Bateman as Mark, a guy in the middle of a midlife crisis, not ready to face that he’s probably not going to be a rock star. Juno and Mark hit it off as she discovers that he’s into rock music and has strong convictions about horror movies.

I’m going to leave all the rest for you to discover on your own. The movie continues its ability to remain engaging through the old-fashioned standbys of rich characters and taking unexpected, though believable, turns. There are a lot of moments and lines of dialogue that could easily have become eye-rollers, but the cast is able to find a way to make them interesting, or the director or screenwriter is able to play the preciousness against other serious elements so that the entire thing keeps its balance.

Everyone was good, but Ellen Page and Jennifer Garner really stood out for me. Page is able to bring a great deal of nuance and the appearance of thought to her lines, and it was a welcome surprise to see her nominated for best actress for this film. As I mentioned, Garner brings a warmth and genuine yearning to her role that keeps her character from becoming the one-note “career-woman monster” she could easily have become. This sets up well for a shift in sympathies that occurs toward the end of the film.

While I was watching it I was thinking “This is the best movie ever!” but I have to confess that I barely thought about it at all afterward and since, which is my only disappointment about it. I admire the writing, direction and performances, but none of them really left me with that much afterward. But that’s no reason not to see it.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

Sure, although it may not leave you with all that much afterward.