Juno (and I hereby swear that the phrase “whip-smart” will not appear anywhere in this review)
Drop everything and go see the film Porpoise is calling the “best movie of 2007”! (And your faithful Otter calls it “the second best movie of 2007,” after , which really came out in 2006, but which I’m counting as a 2007 release because if Roger Ebert does, then why can’t I?)
Yes, is one of this year’s unexpected-pregnancy movies—along with , , and —but for some reason, it has drawn less criticism from the press for the main character’s decision not to have an abortion, even though Juno MacGuff’s reasons are as vague as any of the other protagonists’. This seems strange, considering that Juno is sixteen, whereas the other women (at least in Knocked Up and Waitress) are relatively responsible women in their twenties. Maybe—and I’m being optimistic here—it’s because people really recognize that Juno is a better movie—funnier, more complex, better constructed, and without the undercurrent of misogyny that runs through Knocked Up.
First of all, it’s got great acting. Ellen Page is entirely believable as a wordy, precocious teenager who finds herself pregnant after impulsive sex with her best friend. Some have criticized her lines as too smart, and there were a couple that did seem a little forced—but because these were near the beginning of the film, I think that effect may actually be intentional. The movie doesn’t coast on cuteness at the expense of Juno’s real character growth; the smart lines don’t drop off as she discovers that she’s not as mature as she thinks she is, but they gain nuances.
Michael Cera does his sweet-awkward routine from impeccably here as Paulie Bleeker, the baby’s unwitting father. J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney are fabulous as Juno’s working-class dad and stepmom. The biggest surprise for me, however, was how good Jennifer Garner was as the prospective adoptive mother to Juno’s incubating baby. A perfectionist yuppie who believes she was “born to be a mother,” her character Vanessa reminded me of several people I have known and disliked. But the movie doesn’t leave her the way we meet her, and it doesn’t leave us with the same attitude either. Someone please give Garner a Best Supporting Actress nomination: she deserves it for making me consider charity towards people who typically annoy me.
Jason Reitman (son of Ivan Reitman of fame) may become one of my favorite comedy directors. His last film, , made the cynical me delighted, while Juno made friends with both my cynical and my sappy sides by being neither cynical nor sappy. The new It Screenwriter of the year, Diablo Cody, has succeeded in making a quirky indie script that isn’t preoccupied with its own quirkiness. It actually has a plot, and it goes somewhere, and characters change along the way.
The folky songs that play during much of the movie are more noticeable than most movie soundtracks, but not in a distracting way. Juno herself is very opinionated about music, and though these songs probably wouldn’t be in line with her taste, the unified style announces that they are someone’s idiosyncratic music preferences, and so it works tonally. Most of the songs are by Kimya Dawson, though there are a couple of contributions by Belle and Sebastian (the Scottish band named after the dearly departed Nickelodeon show of my youth). Make sure you stick around through the credits to hear the extremely odd “I am a vampire, I am a vampire, and I have lost my mouth again.” I promise you’ll be singing it for days. And then you’ll so you can learn all the words. At least that’s what Porpoise and I did.
3 comments January 4th, 2008