From the Dec. 14 Oregonian ....
Apparently this is the year of the well-made comedy about unplanned pregnancy. On the heels of "Waitress" and "Knocked Up" and probably a few other movies I'm forgetting comes "Juno" -- a funny and (eventually) sincere indie about what happens when an acerbic teen (Ellen Page) finds herself "in a fat suit I can't take off."
Anyone who saw Ms. Page as the cunning jailbait avenger in "Hard Candy" knows this 20-year-old is a sharp actress. "Juno" may make her a movie star. Her Juno MacDuff is a self-styled teen iconoclast who hides her turmoil under a thick frosting of wisecracks. When she seduces (and finds herself bearing the child of) her former bandmate, a studious track dork (Michael Cera), she responds by throwing up a wall of dark humor. She rails against the clinical adult description of teens as "sexually active." She complains that "being pregnant makes me pee like Seabiscuit" and walks around with an old man's pipe in her mouth and jokingly asks for booze when offered a beverage.
After she decides to put her impending spawn up for adoption, she finds a matching-track-suit couple (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) advertising for a baby in the Penny Saver -- and one of her first questions is why they don't adopt a child from China, where "they give away babies like free iPods."
For a good half-hour, the wisecracking (from a script by blogger/memoirist Diablo Cody) is funny but relentlessly in love with its own cleverness; the movie feels like it's trying way too hard to be offbeat. Every line is something like a kid saying "Honest to blog!" instead of "Honest to God!," or a shop clerk (Rainn Wilson) saying to Juno as she shakes her pregnancy-test stick, and I quote, "What's the prognosis, Fertile Myrtle? Minus or plus?.... That ain't no Etch-A-Sketch. This is one doodle that can't be undid, home-skillet." Uh, okay. Combine this with the endless soundtrack of adorable folk songs and the funny character names, and there's a legit fear the movie is going to be exhaustingly "quirky." (Emily Gould at Gawker did an excellent job summing up why this is going to be a deal-breaker for many viewers.)
But then, with help from some light-touch direction by Jason Reitman ("Thank You For Smoking"), the movie relaxes into itself and Cody shows her cards: What makes Page's performance wonderful is the way Juno's irony-mask slowly slides off as the stakes of her pregnancy get higher.
Much of this unfolds via Juno's borderline-inappropriate friendship with Bateman's character, who bonds with her over music and horror movies. Juno clearly favors him over Garner's uptight "baby-starved wingnut," but by film's end, Cody is asking a serious question: Does a good parent necessarily have to be cool?
Page, blessed with a dry wit beyond her years, plays beautifully off Bateman, who grows quieter as the drama escalates. Cera does another riff on his "Arrested Development" persona, and may be the only actor on earth who could say ""You seem to be getting pregnanter these days" and manage to sound sincere. Best of all are Juno's parents, played by Allison Janney and J.K. Simmons; the best scene in the film is probably their deadpan reaction to the news that Juno is pregnant.
Reitman, cinematographer Eric Steelberg and editor Dana E. Glauberman do subtle work, focusing on little details and moments, and they deliver a couple of great shots: one where the students at Juno's school part like the Red Sea as she walks to class, and another lovely late-film moment -- set to an acoustic cover of the Moldy Peaches' "Anyone Else But You" -- that will probably send kids scrambling for the soundtrack album.
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B-plus; 92 minutes; rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, sexual content and language.
'Juno' (The Oregonian, Dec. 14, 2007)
A small question - did anyone else see the boom mike in the scene where Juno tells her parents that she is pregnant? It happened two or three times in that scene.
Posted by: michelle | January 19, 2008 at 02:30 PM
yes and in quit a few other scenes...it drove me crazy. It distracted me throughout the film. I did love it but had to wonder how the editor missed it or if they left it in for some reason.
Posted by: todd | February 13, 2008 at 03:46 PM