indie-movie preggers, yey!

Rating: 8/10 (27 December 2007)

Juno is an adorable sort of movie because, for the most part following its first third (which is "hip" on parade), the genuine impulses of the characters come out without contrivance. As this and Knocked Up have shown us in 2007, a movie where its main character gets pregnant is, for the writer and/or director, like a Western in approaching the form: you know where it will lead (duh, waa, waa, it's a fill-in-the-blank), but the fun is filling in the blanks of the characters and sharp dialog and story points.
While, as will be quite arguable with some, Knocked Up might have a better hold on its tone from start to finish, writer Diablo Cody is a sharp cookie, with a sense of wit that knows no bounds, as if someone dug into the latest indie kid at a high school and learned all the little ins and outs of what is really cool in what should be usually the outcast (which, by the way, is what ends up being "hip" in that Ghost World kind of way). Her script starts off with scenes and dialog that, actually, don't ring entirely true as reality, but it is fun to hear the actors say such dialog that would give Daria a run for her money, some of it even laugh-out-loud funny ('oo, Woody Allen!")
But as the film goes along, particularly in its last third, it really deepens in the sense of the weight of the situation at hand- there's a baby, hello parents! What starts off as genuinely (and please I mean this as a compliment) quirky stuff turns into sweet and tragic-comic. Reitman ends up striking it out of Cody's material with a similar freshness he brought to Thank You for Smoking (there's one little scene involving the 'type' of girl some guy likes that Juno points out, and it's just like his quick style from the former film). He's a good chip off the old block, as it were.
But lets get to acting, which most have raved about a lot in the press and online. Ellen Page is, indeed, the breakout actress of, well, the moment I guess. She just clicks with this character, as she did (maybe more frustratingly so) in Hard Candy, and through Juno's slings of comebacks and pop culture references she's never misses a beat- by the time we see her layers peeled away as a scared, frightened pregnant teen, she's perfectly vulnerable. Meanwhile, Bateman breaks out after a string of bad comedies, Michael Cera stretches his legs (so to speak) pretty well, and JK Simmons and Alison Janney steal any scene they're in, bar-none, with Simmons especially playing one of the most realistic dads in any teenage comedy I've ever seen.
It's huggable at times, and endless with its "indie" appeal- hence the cute songs from Kimya Dawson- and had Cody just tightened the reins on that first third, where she goes for broke in trying to impress anyone who's to read her script, she'd have a really great genre-bending hit. As it stands, however, it's really, really fun, and did I mention huggable? Preggers rock, woo! 8.5/10