Half-baked bun in the oven

Rating: 6/10 (21 January 2008)

There are many things that are redeemable about this film, but there are some flies in the ointment, as well. Let's start with what is not so good: The screenplay, which is hugely uneven, and has Juno and Leah spouting off one round after another of conceited but hugely clever, sixteen-year-old assessments of the world, in ways that no sixteen-year-old I have ever been around is able to do. Most sixteen-year-olds are anxious to sound adult, but what usually comes out of their mouths are carefully rehearsed, oft-repeated catch phrases that make the utterer sound and seem irretrievably stupid. Some of the quirkiness (and therefore attractiveness) in Juno has to do with her individuality, but she doesn't sound too terribly original when she insists that Iggy Pop made the best music that ever was (this sounds like something a teenager desperate to be different might have read and latched onto in Rolling Stone magazine), nor does she strike one as all that cool when she is shown with a cheeseburger phone that would certainly have seemed more fitting in the hands of a five-year-old. Worse yet, she decides to seduce the school dweeb, Bleeker, a boy with very little going for him except for his genetically inherited propensity for study and quietude. Unfortunately, the resolution in the film concerning Juno's relationship with Bleeker is far from satisfactory and left me wondering if I had just been to Disney. Juno's parents aren't nearly as upset as one would expect when she reveals the rather tawdry consequences of her seduction to them; but it's the heroic gesture made by Juno, to find good, loving parents for her soon-to-be-born child, that is the most muddled in this film. We are shown the characteristic suburban homes in the neighborhoods of the nouveau-riche (where the adoptive parents reside), all cookie-cutter in design and therefore lacking in originality; and I do believe that we are meant at first to dislike the adoptive mother, who comes off looking like a control freak who has stifled the last remnants of love out of a childless marriage. But then the screenwriter makes a U-turn and suddenly this woman is the victim, and the baby hers to keep, despite the break-up of the loveless marriage and the departure of the ex-husband for way cooler digs, a loft in the city. The screenwriter was at pains to show the class differences between Juno's parents and the adoptive parents, but he fumbles the ball by putting all the foul language in Juno's step-mother's mouth and by showing her out to be a hoyden most likely to take umbrage if you cross your eyes at her step-daughter: the tirade she engages in against the technician at the hospital, for example, is pointless. If it's meant to show the white working-class animus toward Hispanics, it doesn't quite work. And, it sounds terribly contrived, at the end, when Juno admits, as she's lying in her hospital bed with the dweeb, that the baby had never been her own from the start and had always really belonged to the adoptive mother. Good things about this movie: the performances of Alison Janney and J.K. Simmons, who were given precious little to work with, but who manage, just the same, to give the film some backbone; Jason Bateman's scenes with Juno are marvelously delivered. Ellen Page, on the other hand, needed to tone down the staccato rhythm of her interjections and give her character breathing room.