JUNO

by Kevin Koehler

Buzz can be a blessing and a curse.  It gets asses in seats, obviously.  A good segment of these people will find it easier to enjoy something if they're told beforehand that they're supposed to.  What you are about to see is good so like it.  If you don't, you are probably a philistine, a contrarian looking for arguments, or a humorless asshole that can't get pleasure from anything, much less the mirthful life of a teenage girl who gets pregnant and acts like a smart-ass about it for an hour and a half.

The bad thing about buzz is that you end up measuring the film against the high praise you'd heard rather than evaluating it upon its own merits.  And this is the problem with Juno, a perfectly fine, even charming film: it's not as good as you heard.

The titular Juno (Ellen Page) is a quick-witted junior in high school who drinks blue slushees and talks on a telephone shaped like a hamburger.  Once, she fucked her socially-awkward-but-likable-guy best friend Paul Bleeker (Michael Cera); it's what teenagers do but she also has sublimated sexual feelings for him.  Anyway, now she's pregnant and it was unexpected.  After an aborted trip to an abortion clinic (where the vocal patterns of Asians are mocked to comic effect), Juno decides not necessarily to keep the baby but to carry it to term.  She scans the Pennysaver ads for prospective parents seeking a child, deciding upon WASP-y couple Mark and Vanessa (Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman).  It seems theirs is the perfect marriage until cracks begin to show: she's the anal-type who can't decide whether to paint the nursery custard or cheesecake while he suffers from suspended adolescence, still holding to his dreams of being a rock star rather than the middle-aged guy who writes shitty jingles for deodorant commercials.

Much had been made of novice screenwriter Diablo Cody's captivating life story.  Formerly an exotic dancer and phone sex operator, Cody was plucked from blogging obscurity by Hollywood rather like Lana Turner at the virtual soda fountain; except, this time the story is real.  One Steven Spielberg has marked her with his divine seal of approval - the two are collaborating on a television series for Showtime.  It's a splendid tale (Diablo Cody is a chosen nom de plume; her real name is Brook), one ready-made for soundbites, radio interviews, and titillating anecdotes told from plush talk-show couches.

One does not begrudge her sudden success.  Ms. Cody clearly has talent, a flair for dialogue, and perhaps most importantly, a voice, albeit one crowded with unrelenting verbiage and pop culture references.  The world of Juno is populated by the agents of homogenous suburban living, tagged and cataloged (not to mention photographed with fetishistic gusto) so future generations can one day revisit the film as some sort of anthropological record.  Sunny D and McGruff the Crime Dog.  Hot pockets.  Bed frames fashioned like cars and color-safe bleach.  Tic-tacs.  Tony Little gazelle machines.  The filmic intention probably has something to do with Proust and his precious madeleines, to provoke a remembrance of our own things past.  What results is some strange simulacrum of reality played out against a sensitive, indie-rock soundtrack; a place where sixteen-year-old pregnant girls reference Soupy Sales, crying out "Thundercats are go" when their waters break.

It's all, generally-speaking, nice.  Cute.  Sometimes, it's even funny.  These are the adjectives that spring to mind.  There are worse things to be, obviously; parents and children get along in Juno, eschewing (to relief) the adversarial relationships that tend to dominate films about adolescents in turmoil.  Yet for a film with a heroine with a self-proclaimed affinity for punk, Juno surprisingly lacks subversiveness.  Nothing is really challenged, certainly not the kind of independent film genre convention conformity that will likely make the picture, for better or worse, this year's Little Miss Sunshine.  I don't mean to damn this film with faint praise; such is the price of buzz.

It's just not as a good as I heard.

Interesting footnote: Some viewers have remarked on the similarities between this picture and a South Korean one entitled Jeni, Juno.  Directed by Kim Ho-Joon, that film also centers on a young high school couple who suddenly find themselves having to deal with an unplanned pregnancy.  Despite the bizarre title congruence, the two pictures have no relationship to each other.  Juno is not a remake and writer Cody claims never to have seen the other.  "Unbeknownst to me, we had another spiritual cousin out there, a Korean movie called "Jeni, Juno," she said on her blog. "This time, the cousinry goes one step further and the movie is about--seriously--a pregnant teenager and her cute, sweet boyfriend. (The guy character is named Juno, not the girl.) There's no adoption subplot and apparently the film is otherwise dissimilar to mine, but how messed up is that?"

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