A "review" of Juno

I finally got off of my butt and caught a matinee of Juno this afternoon. I feel the need to really sell this review, as a couple of different people have shared with me that they want to see it, but haven't actually gotten an honest and even-keeled review from a trusted cohort that compels them to go watch the film themselves.

That being said, where should I begin? At the part where Kitty Pryde from the third X-Men movie takes off her cherry-print underwear? Or at the part where she trades mix CDs with the guy from Arrested Development? Maybe I should just point out that Juno's dad is J. Jonah Jameson from the Spider-Man films. Are you sold yet?

Juno, a.k.a. Kitty Pryde, a.k.a, the future Mrs. Me, is a typical midwestern teenage girl. She has a girl friend, a guy friend, and a penchant for drinking 52-ounce blue Slurp 'n' Swallows. I have read that Juno is stylistically akin to Rushmore, and having seen them both I agree. This is not a movie so much as it is a play, its acts divided by seasons and its star an iconoclastic teenager with relationship issues.

Whereas Max Fischer defines himself as an extracurricular superstud, Juno's classwork and her background are unimportant. The story focuses on her unanticipated pregnancy and the events that surround her as she decides to carry her spawn to term and dump it unceremoniously into the hands of a picturesque upper-class barren couple. She is, to all methods of inspection, a typical girl in atypical circumstances. I've surveyed all of the sixteen-year-old girls I know, and they unilaterally agree (along with the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny) that Juno embodies a very real, very down-to-earth averageness in its players. There are no heroes here, no messiahs, no world-class champions defying every odd and saving the world. Juno is just a scared girl trying to make the most of a situation she cannot escape. She chugs Sunny Delight in order to make enough urine for a pregnancy test. She covers up her morning sickness. She contemplates suicide, hanging herself from the tree in her front yard with a giant licorice whip that she buys along with the pregnancy test.

In short, Juno is just a girl, and she does very average, unremarkable girly things. What sets her apart, and what makes the story interesting, is that she approaches her newfound zygote with a detached, analytical attitude. She's made her bed, and now we watch as she tries valiantly to weasel out of it. The biggest flaw I find in this film is that Juno (along with the rest of the characters) are too detached, too removed, from what one can only presume is a sudden and jarring event. With a single short conversation, she gets 100% familial support for her plan to deliver the child and hand it off to people she's already screened. There is no yelling, no crying, and she even has a cool and controlled conversation with her baby daddy regarding the other girl he plans to take to the prom.

Odd. You'd think that with raging hormones coursing up and down her veins, Juno might be perfectly entitled to a freak out on occasion. As it happens, she behaves far more maturely than a sixteen-year-old likely would or could. I consider that unrealistic. You might, too. Once Juno decides to carry her offspring to term, a fact identifiable from the rotund tummy bump she sports on the movie's promo poster, she gets very mature very quickly. Her old life of playing guitar and staring at the genitalia of the high school track team dissolves and reintegrates into a new person with a new purpose other than staving off Minnesotan teen boredom. She goes looking for a way to unload her bairn.

She finds a suitable set of adoptive parents in the guise of Alias and Teen Wolf Too. This happy couple is rich and barren, and Juno merrily designs to give the child over to them but quickly finds out that Teen Wolf Too owns a guitar and she finds that fact to be just marinated in awesome sauce. From there, they develop a friendship that impedes on Alias's synthesized maternal instincts and breaches Juno's original goal of cleanly getting the child out of her life forever.

Ultimately, Juno is an inverted coming of age tale about a girl who finds herself pregnant and who does what we all do every day: cope with the problems in our lives to the best of our abilities. She comes out a bit older, a bit wiser, and with a new perspective on things. She's just a girl who coped.

This movie gets big pluses for including some love for Dario Argento's Suspiria, but I have to confess I prefer looking at one of his other works these days. Also, I am totally going to watch Hard Candy now. I know I should have seen it by now, but I've been busy not screaming about how awesome Ellen Page is. Consider it making up for lost time.