Juno

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched ‘Juno.’

Hmm.

I can’t deny that it choked me up and engaged me. So, I must’ve liked it.

But I was trying not to like it almost from the start – certainly from the convenience store clerk’s overwritten dialogue, and all the slang.

Here’s the story, though I bet you’ve seen it.

16 year old Juno discovers she is pregnant. She is a geeky girl, a nerd outcast of sorts, though her dad and stepmom both support and like her.

At first she goes to have an abortion, but something about the clinic setting freaks her out and she can’t go through with that so she finds a childless couple who seem the perfect couple, and they say they will pay for her medical expenses, and she says she will give them the child.

Her pregnancy follows, including her awkward relationship with the kid who is the father, but they are not really dating; her friendship with the cheerleader, the discomfort of being heavy. But most of the scenes revolve around her growing relationships with the adopting couple. The husband seems to be relaxed and able to relate to Juno on her level, talking about rock bands and music and horror movies. The mother though is a corporate worker bee, and too tightly wound, wanting the child too much, too anxious, too eager, too desperate.

But the twist comes when the father adopter is afraid to be a father, he initiates divorce proceedings against his wife, and moves out.

This precipitates the crisis, the second curtain; Juno doesn’t know what to do, and we get a series of short scenes in which clues for the resolution are given to us, but not the full answer. (this is rather a cheat but it leads to a more satisfactory ending because it prolongs the suspense for us).

She reconciles with her boyfriend and they become truly boyfriend and girlfriend. She has the child, and it’s almost the usual giving-birth sequence of scenes. And she doesn’t see the child after delivery, because she considers it to be the adopting mother’s in reality.

Adopting mother, alone, not alone, gets to hug and hold her baby.

Juno and her boyfriend get to go back to practicing for their rock band, kissing, happy together.

There are points about it that bugged me, though.

The witty repartee strikes me as over the top – it fits a stylized movie world but not this indie/naturalistic world.

Best moments were the quiet ones where the witty repartee stopped.

For this reason, perhaps, Jen Garner steals the picture for me. She has the highest ration of silent to talky scenes, and she almost never has a witty banter line. Almost all (or even all) of her lines are straightforward, sincere, honest, never trying to conceal her emotions under witty banter or pop culture references.

Camera moves were clichés all the way. So much they annoyed me, but then those moves that annoyed me were subtle and so common that most viewers probably would not even notice them.

Lighting was good, production design good, costumes good, focus was rarely a problem. Technically, this is top notch for an indie, though I don’t know if i’d call it an indie really, outside of the script.

I think it’s a bit too girl-power as a subject to grab me all the way, and that’s probably a big part of my resisting it.

I had a great fear lest Juno and Bleeker wed and raise the kid themselves. The script and direction successfully pushed me in the direction of that fear (I suppose it would be ‘hope’ for many in the audience but it was ‘fear’ to me because it would have been too neat by half). I was so happy they fooled me. Though I should have remembered the note would pay off, and how else could it pay off? With a shot of Jen Garner sobbing and alone and miserable over a note saying ‘the kid is mine, you don’t deserve a child’? That wouldn’t have been very nice, and then the picture wouldn’t have had the boxoffice legs it did, and I knew it did have those legs, and would arrive at a very satisfying ending for bourgeois Americans over a very controversial subject, you know?).

(written around 6 March 2009)