Charming, funny, sweet, and irresistibly entertaining

Rating: 8/10 (30 January 2008)

Like most films in the genre, including most recently last year's Little Miss Sunshine, the actual story of Juno is surprisingly simple. Just as Little Miss Sunshine could best be described as a "dysfunctional family's road trip", Juno is about "a teenage girl who gets pregnant and decides to keep the baby." By keeping it simple and not assailing us with multiple story lines and side-tracking subplots, first-time writer Cody achieves something that many other major motion pictures fail to achieve, and that is creating a movie that is about its characters, and not about its story. And what wonderful characters they are. Cody provides us with an immensely attractive packaging, providing her characters with an ultra-quirky form of "new-wave" speech and having them, especially Juno and her best friend, speak in a manner that I think is safe to say nobody speaks in the real world we live in. Juno is starkly characterized as a very unique individual: sarcastic, frightfully open about her feelings, cynical, tom-boyish, impulsive, and many other such characterizations that make her truly a fantastic character to behold. All the other characters are similarly exaggeratedly characterized: Michael Cera's Paulie Bleeker's unprecedented naivety and sweetly geeky devotion; Jennifer Garner's Vanessa's crazed obsession; Jason Bateman's Mark's exceptional laid-back attitude; and more. But what Cody does that is truly remarkable is providing her characters with true, realistic, real-world emotions despite their over-the-top facades. As the film progresses, for instance, we go from simply admiring Juno's unique outward manner of behavior to truly and deeply caring for her; the same goes for the other characters as well. And I absolutely love how Cody shatters the teen film cliché of overbearing parents, and provides Juno with probably the most wonderfully compassionate and understanding parents in any teen movie, for example her father, J.K. Simmons' Mac, who instead of shunning her for her mistake instead immediately offer her their help and advice. I especially love how Allison Janney completely breaks the overbearing she-demon formula of stepmother characters and provides Bren with a truly kindly character who cares only for her stepdaughter's well-being, as seen in the brilliantly wonderful scene in the ultrasound clinic when she snaps at the technician for passing judgment on her stepdaughter's pregnancy.
Despite the immensely talented supporting cast, perhaps not quite reaching the bravura cast of Reitman's first feature film, Thank You For Smoking, but impressive all the same, there's no doubt in my mind that the true stunner, the brightest shining star is young Ellen Page. Her role as master manipulator in last year's Hard Candy was simply a prelude to her truly outstandingly immense talent as a multi-layered actress, which she showcases in full force as Juno MacGuff. It is a virtuoso performance to behold; Page manages to deliver Cody's undeniably complex and difficult dialogues with such pitch perfection, while still managing to retain the proper realism of a true, real-world teenage girl. Page allows all of Juno's compassion to show right through her showy, unique façade, and manages to create an incredibly fascinating film character while delivering one of the best performances of the year. And at just 20 years old, it is clear that Page has only good places to go from here, and hopefully this as her first major starring role will propel her career in the direction it deserves. I cannot wait to see what more she has to offer, because if she has this much talent at a young age, just imagine what can happen if she goes down the path of the likes of Kate Winslet or Jodie Foster, who both delivered fine performances at a young age and only got better from there.
But Cody and Page are not the only ones deserving of consummate admiration for their work in creating these characters and letting the true, real emotion and drama seep through the entertaining, quirky façade. It is, after all, the director who brings everything together and Jason Reitman seems the perfect choice. He's certainly building up a name for himself, what with two undeniably fantastic works of big-cast indie comedies now under his belt. In both works he does an admirable job of not taking center stage; his two films are as much his casts' and his writers' as they are his. No showy cinematography, no in-your-face direction, no gimmicks; Reitman manages the ever-so-difficult task in independent film of letting go of control and of ego and simply letting the wonderful source material exist and be portrayed in the absolutely best way possible.
It is a great and difficult task that pays off wonderfully when a film manages to emotionally and dramatically engage the viewer. It is even more admirable when a film manages to do this while at the same time be fantastically accessible; charming, funny, sweet, and irresistibly entertaining. Juno manages it all so wonderfully that it's an unprecedented pleasure of a film to watch: funny, engaging, quirky, interesting, but at the same time resonant, honest, compassionate, and truly, insightfully dramatic. Cody takes a simple real-world situation, puts it in a quirky indie-film fantasy world, but populates it with wonderfully true and sympathetic characters. Ultimately the film is about them; it's about Juno perhaps using her unusual, quirky façade to hide her true feelings; it's about Paulie's sweet, naïve devotion; it's about Vanessa's initially funny desperate obsession which we eventually understand is a beautiful desire to bring life to another person in the world; it's about Mark's wild, too-cool-to-conform attitude that eventually turns out to be an unfortunately juvenile lack of maturity; and it's about how all of these characters come together in a world of youth, impulse, beauty, love, hamburger phones and track runners.