Friday, September 1, 2017

"Pro-Life but Pro-Choice"



Juno
2007
D: Jason Reitman
**********
Pros: Some Good Arcs and Emotional Moments, Some Funny Lines, Story Had Potential
Cons: Not That Funny, Inorganic Characterization and Dialogue, Some Childish Moments, Immature Treatment of Abortion Issue, Two Deal-Breaking Scenes, Bland Soundtrack



       Ten years ago today, this movie was released.  It seemed promising enough: it was a dry comedy starring Jason Bateman and Michael Cera that was getting pretty good reviews (which might have been the result of bribery).  The dialogue in Diablo Cody’s script was subject to a great deal of praise culminating in an Academy Award win for Best Original Screenplay.  This praise was actually rather overblown.  While some recognized it as overhyped from the beginning, others took a while to have that epiphany.  In fact, “to Juno” [3] is now a term that means “to look back at something you liked and realize it wasn’t that good.”  I suspect that the movie’s initial popularity was the result of its short-term appeal to three different groups of people:
1.       Hip youngsters who were tricked by the presence of Jason Bateman and Michael
Cera (as well as the orange motif) into thinking they were watching something as funny as Arrested Development
2.       Pro-Lifers who can’t take a hint
3.       People who like to ogle pregnant teenagers
One of these groups got its money's worth.
So now I’m going to go into more detail why I’m not that big a fan of this movie while at long last bringing closure to my crusade against overrated* 2007 movies.
       Movie begins with a rotoscope of 16-year-old Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) walking while drinking copious amounts of liquid.  When the picture transitions to live-action, she enters a store run by Rollo (Rainn Wilson) and buys a pregnancy test, which she uses in the store bathroom.  Upon getting a positive result, she remarks, “The little pink plus sign is so unholy,” and Rollo responds with, “That ain’t no Etch-a-Sketch.  That’s one doodle that can’t be undid, Homeskillet.”  And here is one of the main problems of the movie: people forego acting like actual people so they can’t force in contrived quips all the time.  You’d think that a confused, frightened teenager wouldn’t talk in jokes upon confirming an unwanted pregnancy while a bystander would sympathize with her plight.  It makes you wonder why this movie got a Screenplay Oscar.

Gifts of obsolete novelty phones are too much to resist, I guess.
      You also might have noticed how dreadfully unfunny those lines were.  Most of the jokes are forced, and there are some that are so lame, like “I’m the cautionary whale,” they make you wonder whether or not they were bad attempts at anti-humor.  Diablo Cody (b. 1978) apparently can’t resist reminding us that she’s a child of the 80’s while writing a movie about children born in the 90’s.  Even some attempts to imitate Millennial slang are pretty awkward in ways I haven’t seen since that of many 90’s children’s shows; at least the movie is up to date when it comes to being behind the times.  While there are some funny lines, many of these are said at inappropriate times.  Almost everything has to be a quip, and that’s a problem that takes you out of the conflicts of so many movies nowadays.  I simply don’t understand how Star Wars supposedly has such obviously bad dialogue while Juno deserves a Screenplay Oscar for lines like “Honest to blog.”
       Juno then informs the father, classmate Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), in a decidedly contrived, hipster-pseudohumorous way.  She gathers an easy chair with a whole bunch of furniture to make a living room set outside his house and waits for him in said chair like a Bond villain until he exits his house for his morning jog.  Apparently this is supposed to represent the fact that they conceived their child during sex on a chair.  It’s an attempt at symbolism so concrete and literal it’s practically child-like and all it accomplishes is that it makes the protagonist seem less credible as a person.  Another reason this scene exists is to force a motif that was already sufficiently handled at the beginning and end of the movie.  “It began with a chair” because Paulie knocked Juno up in a chair in a rash act of sexuality.  “It ended with a chair” with the maternal rocking chair of the adoptive mother, symbolizing a development from immaturity to maturity.    
        Juno and Paulie agree that she should get an abortion.  She discusses the options with her friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby).  She enters the abortion clinic after a brief encounter with classmate Su Chin (Valerie Tian), who was protesting the clinic outside, and decides at the last second not to go through with it.  She looks for interested parents in classified ads with Leah (occasionally making unwarranted snark about some of them) and settles on a couple.  She then breaks the news to her father Mac (J.K. Simmons) and step-mother Bren (Allison Janney).  While I realize that the last thing a pregnant teenager needs is more pressure, they barely even seem to mind.  Not much real shock or internal conflict, just…quips.  There is still some tactlessness, just not the understandable kind.  Mac agrees with Juno that she’s not ready to raise a child, but needlessly brings up a past mistake she made because the movie went twenty seconds without an attempt at humor.  His calm makes it worse.  There’s an almost calculating quality to it.  He even makes a rather uncharitable statement about the possibility of her getting ripped off about “baby-starved wingnuts.”  It makes you wonder why this movie got a Screenplay Oscar. 
          Juno meets with the adoptive parents Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner).  While her relationship with the more serious Vanessa is initially stand-offish, she immediately hits it off with Mark, due to their shared interest in grunge (a tribute to how in touch Cody is with younger Millennials).  Despite first impressions, Juno ends up being closer to Vanessa because of their shared connection with the baby and their strong sense of responsibility.  Meanwhile, Mark, finally admitting that he’s not ready to have a kid because of his dreams of being a rocker, leaves Vanessa and Juno to fend for themselves.  Heartbroken, Juno desperately flees this situation while leaving a note at their door.  This arc is refreshing for its irony and poignancy.
        These scenes are interspersed with rather inane scenes from Juno’s whitewashed, stuck-in-the-80’s high school.  They’re mostly opportunities for more bad jokes, but it eventually develops the protagonist’s relationship to Paulie Bleeker.  Despite an earlier agreement to break up, she confronts him when he finds another girlfriend.  She admits she’s still in love with him as he reminds her that the break-up was her call and it broke his heart.  During one of their more serious moments, Juno invites Paulie to feel the baby, and this scene illustrates that Michael Cera, despite assertions to the contrary, can really act.  When she is rushed into labor, she doesn’t tell Paulie about it so he can complete his track meet.  Upon doing so, he realizes she isn’t there and rushes out the hospital.  Then Vanessa comes to the hospital to joyfully adopt the baby boy.  The movie ends happily with Juno and Paulie together and Vanessa taking care of her new child with the letter from Juno framed on the wall reading “Vanessa: If you’re still in, I’m still in. –Juno.”  It would have been nice for that to be the final shot.
        I would have given Juno a pass as a decent, if somewhat flawed and overpraised, film if not for two rather childish scenes.  The first scene is with Su Chin’s protesting the abortion clinic.  It’s almost quaint by today’s standards, but it is contemptuous and reflects the feelings of the movie’s creators.  First off, she’s chanting the rather foolish slogan “All babies want to get borned,” which implies that pro-lifers have an erroneous view on fetal cognition and…grammar.  The latter is particularly troubling considering that this is the most prominent token minority of the movie.  Juno isn’t the only questionable movie to find itself in the overlap of a rather odd Venn diagram. 

Apparently, this might actually be a thing.
The scene casts doubt on any attempt to pass the movie off as some sort of accidental pro-life tract.  It’s almost like Diablo Cody realized the movie came off a little too pro-life, so she added this scene to temper that accidental theme a little.  The movie panders to pro-life sentiment while shaming pro-life principle.  It makes you wonder why this movie got a Screenplay Oscar. 
        There is an even more brazenly childish scene in which an ultrasound technician (Kaaren de Zilva) displays a lack of bedside manner by mentioning that teen motherhood situations are usually a poisonous environment after hearing that Juno intends to put the child up for adoption.  Bren, not satisfied to simply call her out on her presumption, goes on this shallow, ignorant rant about the woman’s profession, implying through lame outside jokes that an idiot can do it based only on what she, as an outsider, sees.  This is like saying I can be a lawyer just because I can put on a suit.  I’d hate to shame Diablo Cody’s career history (assuming the line was written by her; it seems to be consistent with the dialogue’s style), but I’m pretty sure maintaining and operating important, complicated medical equipment is more respectable than stripping.  It makes you wonder why this movie got a Screenplay Oscar. 
             These scenes are relatively severe symptoms of this movie’s primary affliction: trying to be too funny too often.  Sometimes, banter is like ketchup in that it should be used in extreme moderation, if it should be used at all.  The better quips would have worked well in this movie in moderation (or if they were funny enough).  There are a lot of strengths in the movie.  It has a strong, independent young protagonist who uses a surprisingly amount of initiative in a usually stressful situation.  Her arc emphasizes maturity (I guess you could argue that a tone shift is symbolic of that, but in that case it still should have been funnier).  Her personality balances stoicism with moments of pathos, but her likability and credibility are diminished by the forced and unfunny snark.  Movie develops into a poignant climax with a heartwarming conclusion.  But it was spoiled because it didn’t know when not to be funny.

[opening line]
JUNO: It started with a chair.

JUNO: It ended with a chair.

MARK: You could just wait a couple months.  It’s not like the baby’s going to storm in here any second and demand dessert-colored walls.

MARK: Why does everyone think yellow is gender neutral?  I never knew a guy with a yellow room.

VANESSA: How do I look?
BREN: Like a new mom.  Scared shitless.

JUNO: [in a letter left outside the Lorings’ home after their breakup] Vanessa: If you’re still in, I’m still in. –Juno”


*Technically, 300 was first released in 2006, but its wide release was in 2007, and it was one of the movies that year I had to hear everyone go on about.

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