Desperately seeking spawn
We ended up seeing Juno kind of by accident. We had free tickets, and I wanted to go see The Kite Runner, but it was only showing at Broadway and Chatswood and I didn’t really feel like catching a train into the city purely to see a film. But, I’m glad I did see Juno, because it was a sarcastic, cynical, yet oddly-hopeful story about the pregnant high school student who navigates the complications of how to deal with her unexpected…um, windfall. It’s one of those comedy-dramas which can engage with such issues and still make you laugh.
The film opens with a chair – the chair in which Juno Macguff (Ellen Page), sixteen, had sex with her friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) and, ultimately, became pregnant. After her third pregnancy test coming back positive, Juno elects to have an abortion, but has second thoughts after she is told that a foetus has fingernails and decides instead to go through with the pregnancy and give up her baby for adoption. Juno finds a rich, childless, yuppie couple who are eager to care for her child, and spends time bonding with the prospective adoptive father, Mark (Jason Bateman) over their shared interests in rock music and avant-garde horror. However, not all goes to plan and Juno has to confront the approaching birth, the realities of surrendering a child, Bleeker’s feelings, and the complications of her relationship to the adoptive parents.
The film’s strengths lie clearly in the creation of normal characters who do not offer even a whiff of contrivance. Ellen Page is especially good (I note she is being lauded as the Next Big Thing in indie film) as the titular character – she is sassy, intelligent, witty, cynical, but scared. Sort of like a knocked-up Buffy Summers. The dialogue flows fast and it flows sarcastic and laden with (mostly) funny observations on pregnancy, high school and the social context of having babies in America.
Juno does not dwell much on her bond with the baby growing inside her; when she tells her friend she is pregnant, there is no anger or tears, simply a conversation on a hamburger phone affirming that she is, fo’shizz, up the spout. The half-expected gooing and gaaing over the baby is absent and left largely to Vanessa (brilliantly played by Jennifer Garner), the neurotic, hypermaternal adoptive mother who thinks she can learn mothercraft purely from books.
Any questions about the morality of teenage pregnancy are generally channelled through Juno’s father, but the matter is dropped early in the film (once the identity of the father is established, any disapproval is left to the occasional raised eyebrow by Juno’s father), perhaps to avoid alienating the film’s prospective audience, but more likely because sexually-active teenagers are the norm these days and perhaps it isn’t really a big issue for non-Christians to question whether or not such behaviour is OK.
A neat soundtrack and a happy ending tied this film up for me. Not the greatest piece of cinema ever, but a clever and entertaining one. Three and-a-half stars, Margaret.