We were silent at the end

Rating: 8/10 (31 December 2007)

I just saw Juno on a cold and dreary day. Theater a third filled, but that third almost all young girls, high school, late middle school, a few early college maybe, no older women, no older men. The movie is about a high school girl who has sex with her dorky boy friend, seduced by a chair she says, and the act is told in flashback as she tries again and again, with the Greek chorus of a convenience store clerk and customer, to make a pregnancy test change from positive to negative through sheer will and repetitive testing.
It's one of those movies that touches your heart. With the actors speaking in a vernacular that rings true. Using language hidden from those beyond high school that is so descriptive and so natural that it makes TBHS (those beyond high school) think, for at least a second, beyond inherent cultural and age superiority, that true beings, as true as when they were in high school, actually walk the corridors and unlock lockers and have sex and become jealous and fall in love and make the same dumb mistakes that you made too. Juno the movie and Juno the person have true emotions, and show us real lives rather than the familiar dross of sit com exploitations, MTV reality shows, and adolescent sex comedies which appear with some regularity at our local multiplex.
I remember experiencing what mass media said about my generation's life in high school when I was in high school. It wasn't even wrong. It was embarrassing and contemptible. They had no ear, no empathy, nor sympathy for what we thought or felt or were. Stories complete with glossaries of terms and definitions to hip their readership to what was today's teen world. Meretricious, utter crap.
High school. Sex and love. Life. Situations requiring emotional understanding beyond one's age group, family, jutting up against adults trying to understand, wondering what is real and if love is real and if love can be forever...such is the stuff of Juno. You can argue, if in a cynical mood, that the language is too hip and too easy to the tongue of the characters, and that Dorothy Parker isn't a knocked up teenager in Minnesota in 2007, that Juno is as fictive as Jupiter's wife, but that would be missing the point of going to the movies.
All of these characters are given the opportunity to live on the screen. I watched and wondered, not knowing, how much of this movie was the product of the screenwriter's life and how much of her imagination? It does not really matter, of course, but even asking such a question gives an indication of how good a movie Juno is.
In most movies pregnancy and children are props or opportunities for one liners or just in the background. But, this movie isn't like that. In Juno, there are no big messages just the grand and glorious message that life is, that people live it the best they can, and that a good writer and a good director can use that big screen for small moments with big emotions and take the audience with them as Juno and her dad and step mom and best friend and boyfriend and surrogate couple get through nine months of her Junior year and summer.
The audience laughed and sighed during the movie and there was a moment of silence as the screen went black as if we all wished Juno would stay around a little longer. Ellen Page, is wonderful, as much of a cynic as Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 'Brick', but like him as in all cynics, a thin protective veneer hiding the open heart of a romantic just below. Like all of us.