Baby Formula

Rating: Null/10 (21 January 2008)

Okay, we've had some experiments by risktakers, and now its clear what this new formula is. This movie is effective because it understands what that formula is, what it has to do and then does it with precision.
The formula is to take adolescent vulnerability, define it away from the normal high school stereotypes, and exploit it with coolness depicted lightly. So what you do is discard one of the two primary urges of youth (to belong) and emphasize the other, to be cool (to which others want to belong). Being cool is a token standing for being genuine and true. You are therefore endearing and what weaker teens aspire to be.
All of us are essentially teens (or pretending not to be), so this dynamic plays on the attractiveness of the character. Its a simple formula, rendered here by very clear writing devices. Its important that the boyfriend be uncool, with his only distinguishing attribute that he was picked by the girl. This is done by the usual means; he's a skinny dweeb and acknowledged by everyone as such. But he's also a member of the recurring nameless group of runners, a chorus all undistinguished in their appearance and behavior.
There are writing tricks as well. When we first meet him, she thinks his running shorts are "more gold" than the others. There are three important occurrences where he is conflated with furniture, and the metaphor is made stronger by our heroine thinking about assuming the same role. These are so prominent, that I suspect they were the first things imagined.
A key scene has her teetering on the edge of seducing an older man, the husband of the couple designated to receive her baby. What she's done is place herself in the way so that he can seduce her. Its something that we sense as subtle in the movement toward the seduction, when she backs out. He asks why she's there if not for this, and she avers that she "wanted to be a piece of furniture in his life." This is careful writing, very tightly braided.
Of course we aren't meant to see any of this structure because the idea is to fall in love with this girl as exemplar of a personality attractor, and a catalog of desirable traits. She is given some wonderful lines, and directed to deliver them with precisely the type of natural confidence the role requires. Not the role in the movie, but the role such people play in our lives. It helps that she is slight, lesbian (in real life) and confident.
Other writerly devices...
The "adult" couple who will become adoptive parents turn out to be a sort of mirror: a strong woman (with flaws our teen doesn't have) who clearly has picked her male the same way Juno has. He's literally furniture as well, stays home. Has his own room. He is not whole person, and indeed is one of the followers instead of an leader in this social business of who defines who. He leaves the scene to find himself after we learn that is even attracted to Juno.
The whole thing is designed as an abstraction. Well, most of these movies are, but this is all affirmed through the credits when we see not a real film of our character walking (after introducing us to her chair), but a semicartoon. Its a cartoon world, with a semireal Juno walking through it. Those first few minutes of a movie are when we are particularly sensitive to cues about the nature of what we are to see. The visual unreality segues to an encounter with a convenience store clerk that affirms, yes, we are to see a semifantasy here that plays with roles. The music underscores the sketchy cartoon motif by being all overtly handmade.
Once in the thing, we are surrounded with the need to define ourselves by others, with a focus on children. Her mother is defined in 20 seconds in terms of her three new babies. Her stepmom (who has a new baby: "Liberty Bell") is defined in terms of the pseudobabies she still wants. There's the Jennifer Garner character. Its even in little things, like the Manga comic designed for boys of a kickass pregnant teen.
Its significant that except for a teary moment near the end, Juno doesn't need a baby to be cool. And we end lingering with a view of that innocent, natural strength, as she goes back to her chair.
Good writing.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.