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. |
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.
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.
