Last year’s Best Picture nominee Little Miss Sunshine (2006) didn’t really seem to deserve that honor. Best Picture? Really? It was cute enough, but pretty flawed. You might agree. You might think Juno is in the same situation, but it’s not. It’s better than that.
It’s also reminiscent at first of Napoleon Dynamite (2004), at least for the first ten minutes or so of Juno. Arch, ironic, camp — you know what I mean, home skillet? It also seems like it’s going to be a less sophisticated version of Citizen Ruth (1996), a teen black comedy about unintended pregnancy.
But then the adults enter the picture — first Juno’s parents, played by J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney, and then the potential parents, played by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner — and the movie takes off into its own brilliant thing.
You know, it’s okay to have ironic characters who can’t be serious and always have a quip at the ready. But unless you’re making a comedy with cardboard cutout characters or something like the Marx Brothers that refuses to acknowledge pain, it’s important to know what’s going on behind that mask of irony, even if you choose not to show it. Juno eventually does let the mask slip, thanks to an amazing performance by Ellen Page. Juno may act like she doesn’t care, but she does.
And then there’s the couple who are intent on adopting Juno’s baby. Vanessa (Garner) seems like an overly controlling hysteric. Mark (Bateman) seems cool and hip. But over months, Juno’s relationship with them changes. She begins to see that Vanessa may be ideally suited to be a mother to the child that Juno has to give up. And she sees that Mark is cool, but under the surface he’s still the boy that won’t grow up and face adult challenges. He’s passively willing to go along with the baby, but isn’t honest about what he really wants.
Michael Cera is also terrific as the sort-of boyfriend and definite father. Some of the side characters are a little clumsy, but all of the actors cited here get it just right. Kudos also to the script by Diablo Cody and direction from Jason Reitman.
Tags: Juno, J.K. Simmons, Allison Janney, , Jason Bateman, Jennifer Garner, Diablo Cody, Jason Reitman
One Response
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Dan Dorman Says:
This film absolutely was the Little Miss Sunshine of the Oscar season. Juno is pretentious. Its forced-quirky attitude to its life and characters was too distracting to even begin to delve into the complexities of teen life and teen pregnancy.
Diablo Cody’s script was so far out of touch for me it was painful to watch. The hipster dialog annoyed me more than any other movie I think I have ever seen. The blue-collar HVAC Dad saying the line: “Next time I see that Bleeker kid remind me to punch him in the wiener” was so dead-wrong it wasn’t even funny. Who the fuck talks like that? Especially guys like that! Half the lines in this movie felt left over from Superbad to me. 17 and 18 year old girls referring to their sexual organs as “vag”…we’re done.
Sure some of the performances were spot-on (Bateman, Janney) and there’s a few sincere moments in the film but this is not an important movie. Hell, it wasn’t even a good one. Fuckin’ hype.