Juno (2007)

Idea: Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) finds herself pregnant after one night with her best friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) and, after opting out of an abortion, looks to Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) and Mark (Jason Bateman), a couple she found in the Pennysaver, to adopt her unborn child.

I got over my Juno backlash (OMG, you guys, best movie ever! Diablo Cody used to be a stripper! Give Page an Oscar already!) long enough to go see the picture. Is the movie all it's cracked up to be? Pretty much, but not quite.

Remember how people loved, loved, loved Little Miss Sunshine? It's sort of like that. On one hand, a great movie. On the other hand, you have to kid yourself in order not to acknowledge its flaws.

Cody's screenplay is a hoot and a half, and I hope she has a long career ahead of her in Hollywood. She nails Juno's outsider dialogue, as well as the relationships between Juno and her father (a pitch perfect J.K Simmons), Juno and her stepmother (the peerless Allison Janney), and the stepmother and father. There's a scene early on in the movie that you see in the trailers where Juno tells her parents that she's pregnant, and her father exasperatedly says, "I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to say when." Juno replies, "I don't really know what kind of girl I am." What the ads fail to show you is that this reply comes several beats later and on the verge of tears. The sentence has little meaning to it on the page, but it's exactly the kind of nonsense that we've all gotten from our parents over the years, and it does its work beautifully. It levels Juno completely.

Cody's work is filled with that level of believable, livable detail for the most part. Occasionally Juno's slang heavy dialogue slips past "teenager searching for an identity" and into "wildly unbelievable bullshit." Once, just once, she makes an homophobic remark that doesn't jive with the personality already established for the character. Mostly Cody's smart about her lead and about the casting thereof.

Is Page all she's cracked up to be? Yes. She's come a long way from chicken chips and pepperoni runs. In her hands, and her hands alone, Juno is whip-smart and a heartachingly vulnerable. Above all, she's an idiot who's at least smart enough to know she's an idiot. I know that doesn't sound like much, but few people out there can convincingly portray the maturity it takes to know you are immature without forcing the character to instantly fill the gap. Pitted against Cera's affectless and deft comic hand, they make one of the sweetest pairs.

So what's my big problem? Director Jason Reitman. I don't get what the big deal is there. Critics loved, loved, loved his last picture, Thank You for Smoking. They thought it was brilliant. And it was. For the first hour. There was a moment when we are watching the movie when we pulled into a close up of Aaron Eckhart's evil, smiling face, and I thought, "This is genius." Then it kept going for another 32 minutes. For what reason? What purpose? I couldn't tell you.

To be honest, I think he is to blame for the ridiculously obvious acting Garner and Bateman have on display for much of this film. I've seen them enough of both to know that they are both capable of playing complex and subtle when it is called for, so it's unlikely that they would suddenly disappoint me so keenly. With Vanessa, it's a little more believable that her desire for a child would be so naked, and it does deliver a nice pay off in later scenes when Garner gets to tap into the maternal warmth beneath the frosty, WASP-y exterior. With Mark, however, there is no pay off. It's obvious which way he's going from the word go, and the way things end up re: Mark have less of an emotional impact because of it. I just don't see a reason to pin that, at least not in whole, on Bateman.

I still wish Janney got more sexy lady roles than frumpy mom roles, but hey. What the hell. B+