Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
When
Reality Happens to Ironic People
(Juno, 1/14/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Wise children are catnip to screenwriters. Whether we're
talking about the emotional precociousness of a Dakota Fanning, the
solemnity of a Haley Joel Osment, or throwaway gags in comedies like
Annie Hall ("The universe is expanding!"), wise children
can convey all the fun without risking any of the backlash. The pre-pubescent
Webster (Emmanuel Lewis) was an adorable moppet; an 18 year-old version
looking more or less the same, and dropping more or less the same pearls
of adult wisdom, is pathetic.
Which brings us to Juno.
At a time when we're all supposed to be excited about the serious movies
Hollywood has saved up for the holiday season, Jason Reitman's teen
pregnancy comedy is a triumph of counter-counter programming—a
small, October-type release that's earned its way to serious buzz (and
serious money, ranking #3 at the box office last week). The story of
Juno (Ellen Page), a high school junior who turns up pregnant by her
mostly Platonic guy-pal (Michael Superbad Cera), is smart, well-observed,
and funny—though not in a "ha ha" sort of way but in
the sense of being droll and hip.
From the moment we first see her,
swigging from a jug of Sunny-D as she shambles off to buy a pregnancy
test, Juno is the most winning "wise child" to appear onscreen
in a long time. Like so many of her generation, she seems to have become
a pundit of adult life well before she's had time to live it. Her stock
of obscure cultural references, which are delivered in a kind of modulated
radio voice, seems to rival Dennis Miller's. At an age when this writer
was still memorizing Pink Floyd lyrics and making models of Star
Wars spaceships, Juno is a devotee of Iggy Pop and Dario Argento
movies. Her "seen it all" sensibility is the cultural hipster's
equivalent of that fifth-grade pole dance in Little Miss Sunshine.
Insofar as the movie as about when reality happens to painfully ironic
people, it's hard to resist.
What keeps the fun mixed is blogger-turned
screenwriter Diablo Cody's perhaps too-sunny take on the consequences
of teen pregnancy. Juno's folks (Allison Janney and J.K. Simmons) seem
to attain a state of constructive support without struggling much to
get there. True, there are some problems with the couple that mean to
adopt her child (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman) that propel Juno
into situations that are, as she says, "way beyond my maturity
level." But Reitman and Cody are saying, hey, getting knocked up
at 16 doesn't need to be the end of the world. Let's stop dropping moralistic
guilt bombs on our kids. It's all gonna be OK.
Be that as it may, my own tolerance
for our heroine's cultural literacy reached saturation when she made
casual reference to "Soupy Sales." Sales, as some of you might
recall, was a TV and radio comedian whose pinnacle of fame was reached
about forty years ago. (He was most renowned for getting hit in the
face with pies.) How many actual high school juniors, no matter how
smart, have actually heard of him? After conducting my own unofficial
survey of two 17 year-olds and one 15 year-old, I found the answer to
be exactly 0%.
By all means, it's OK to like Juno.
But it's also OK to take her for what she really seems to be—a
device for a 30 year-old screenwriter to have two tons o' fun blogging
onscreen.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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