login/register

Juno is a whip-smart teen confronting an unplanned pregnancy by her classmate Bleeker. With the help of her hot best friend Leah, Juno finds her unborn child a "perfect" set of parents: an affluent suburban couple, Mark and Vanessa, longing to adopt. Luckily, Juno has the total support of her parents as she faces some tough decisions, flirts with adulthood and ultimately figures out where she belongs.

Films about teenage angst are a dime a dozen. Great films about teenage angst are not.

Juno is the second film from director Reitman, whose father Ivan made Ghostbusters but has done little of note since. He has already shown with his debut feature, Thank You For Smoking, an eye for nuance and black humour that is light years beyond his father's populist offerings.

Ellen Page plays the title character, a troubled teen who finds herself pregnant at the age of 16. She decides to put the baby up for adoption and is only to happy when Bateman and Garner's perfect couple offer to lighten her load. Page is a revelation in the title role, taking something of a clichéd character and imbuing it with a quirkiness and depth that hints at future greatness.

It doesn't hurt that all the cast are on top form. Jennifer Garner finally gets a role she can sink her teeth into as the would-be adoptive mother of Juno's baby. Her character's passive aggression, and desperation for a baby so bad that she can't see that her marriage is in trouble, requires a level of acting that is light years away from the frivolities of Alias and Elektra. Julia Roberts could do worse than take a glance over her shoulder.

Juno's biggest strength is its refusal to toe the mainstream line. In other hands this could have been little more than a puerile romp in the vein of American Pie or Superbad. Instead we have a mature and offbeat character piece that deserves all the praise it can get. It's a shame that Juno is being marketed as a laugh out loud teen comedy. Juno has more in common with the Ghostworlds and Rushmores of the world than one dimensional gross-out comedies.

Somewhere between the sharp satire of Election and the rich human comedy of You Can Count On Me lies Juno, a sardonic but ultimately compassionate story of a pregnant teenage girl who wants to give her baby up for adoption. Social misfit Juno (Ellen Page, Hard Candy, X-Men: The Last Stand) protects herself with a caustic wit, but when she gets pregnant by her friend Paulie (Michael Cera, Superbad), Juno finds herself unwilling to terminate the pregnancy. When she chooses a couple who place a classified ad looking to adopt, Juno gets drawn further into their lives than she anticipated.

But Juno is much more than its plot; the stylised dialogue (by screenwriter Diablo Cody) seems forced at first, but soon creates a richly textured world, greatly aided by superb performances by Page, Cera, Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman as the prospective parents, and J.K. Simmons (Spider-Man) and Allison Janney as Juno's father and stepmother. Director Jason Reitman (Thank You For Smoking) deftly keeps the movie from slipping into easy, shallow sarcasm or foundering in sentimentality. The result is smarter and funnier than you might expect from the subject matter, and warmer and more touching than you might expect from the cocky attitude. Page's performance is deceptively simple; she never asks the audience to love her, yet she effortlessly carries a movie in which she's in almost every scene. That's star power. -- Bret Fetzer, Amazon.com

	Enter your search terms Submit search form
	Web www.filmcritique.co.uk