Gets deeper and wiser as it goes, just like Juno herself

Rating: 9/10 (20 January 2008)

Movies named after their main character usually work best if that character has an outsize, iconic quality--and Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) certainly qualifies. A smart-mouthed 16-year-old who becomes pregnant by her friend-with-benefits Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), she is the star of one of the year's best comedy films.
The movie is divided into three sections to correspond with the three trimesters of Juno's pregnancy, as well as the conventional three-act screenplay structure. The first part gets off to a rough start because the dialogue is over-written, too clever by half. Some of this is necessary to characterize Juno as a snarky alterna-teen, but why should a random pharmacist talk this way as well? Also, the filmmakers don't convincingly explain why the self-confident Juno chickens out of getting an abortion.
Things get better with the introduction of Mark and Vanessa (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner), the yuppie couple who want to adopt Juno's baby. Their dialogue is "normal," not overly hip, and their arrival really sets the plot in motion. The relationships between Mark, Vanessa, and Juno become interestingly complex, and their characters deepen--we learn that our first impressions of them do not tell the whole story.
Indeed, although the first part of the movie seems to idealize everything about Juno (her wit, her taste in music, her hamburger phone), it eventually allows her to be unlikable at times. Her flippant jokes do not impress Mark and Vanessa, and she behaves thoughtlessly toward sweet Paulie. When she apologizes to him in front of his cross-country teammates, it's a nice reversal of all those teen movies where the guy publicly apologizes to the girl.
So by the end, what seemed like it was going to be 90 minutes of shallow pop-culture allusions becomes a warmhearted comedy about a teenage girl learning that she still has a lot to learn. Though Juno's dialogue is still sardonic and clever, it no longer feels artificial. At her lowest point, she quips "I've been out dealing with things way beyond my maturity level"--a funny line, but one that shows her vulnerability and fear of growing up too fast.
At least, that's what I got from Ellen Page's reading of that line, and it feels spot-on, like all of her work in this film. Michael Cera assists with his trademark awkward-but-trying-not-to-show-it attitude, and together Page and Cera provide an adorable final scene. Bateman and Garner handle their character development well, and J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney play Juno's sympathetic parents. And I am especially looking forward to writer Diablo Cody's next project--I hope she got her excesses out of her system with the first part of "Juno," because the rest of the movie proves that she can write a charming comedy.