In a season of generally bleak and introspective award contenders,
perhaps it’s no surprise Juno registered in quite the way it did. By far the smallest film amongst 2008’s Best Picture nominations, Jason Reitman’s utterly disarming follow-up to Thank You For Smoking aspires to no greater, and no more noble, an ambition than to put a smile on your face. It can be described, positively, using the same word one of its characters uses to describe its eponymous heroine disparagingly: ‘different’.
Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) is all that, and more: a smart, sensible,
self-assured teenager who, after her first fumble with hesitant distance runner boyfriend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), finds herself with child. Her typically matter-of-fact response is to farm the foetus out for adoption to an upwardly mobile couple: control freak/biological timebomb Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) and frustrated jingle composer Mark (Jason Bateman). The bigger our heroine’s belly grows, however, the further she gets out of her depth, learning that the politics of high-school corridors can’t always be applied to the lives of grown-ups.
The consequences of Juno’s actions, and of those around her, are
persuasively presented in the Oscar-winning screenplay by ex-stripper Diablo Cody, whose writing proves every bit as distinctive as her name. In other mouths, Cody’s slangy, zinger lines (which include this writer’s favourite punchline of the year: “I think I’m set until college on the Tic-Tac front”) might have sounded arch, but Reitman encourages a naturalism in the performances that will most likely win over even those viewers made sceptical by all the hype.
It helps that those performers are across-the-board excellent, from the ever-underrated J.K. Simmons as Juno’s bluff blue-collar pop to the previously undistinguished Garner, bringing palpable warmth to her maternal wannabe. Best of all, though, is Ellen Page, for whom the lead role provides as significant a breakthrough as Alicia Silverstone made with Clueless: tremendously endearing as a girl who mistakenly thinks she’s got it all figured out, she creates loving, substantial relationships with Bateman, Cena and Olivia Thirlby as her sassy best friend. She’s this year’s little miss sunshine.
With Diablo Cody's smart, endlessly quotable (and Oscar-winning) script, this is the breakthrough bittersweet comedy of the year, in which Juno is a whip-smart teenage girl confronting an unplanned pregnancy by her classmate. With the help of best friend Leah, she finds her unborn child a 'perfect' set of parents for its adoption - an affluent suburban couple, Mark and Vanessa, who long for a child, but there are some tough decisions to be taken along the way.
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Juno (Blu-ray)
