Juno
Multi-award winning Juno tells of a teenage girl’s unplanned
pregnancy. Juno is, to a large extent,
the conception of one woman : blogger,
writer, former striptease artist, and generally larger-than-life
unconventionalist, Diablo Cody. In the
title role, Ellen Page (who was twenty-one at the time of filming) gives a convincing portrayal
of the sassy and bright sixteen-year old mother.
Shot
in Vancouver and set in Minnesota (Cody’s home town), the film has been
produced and marketed as a teen flick for the MTV demographic. In that regard, Juno displays many of the features
common to the genre, and introduces to the mix a recently married
couple in their mid- to late-twenties. It turns out that Jason Bateman’s
character, the husband of this couple, can’t commit to his spouse’s needs. It
is tempting to speculate that we are being invited to
understand that Bateman’s character will grow old and pass from this world of Juno, which, for all that it is aware of
the intrinsically realistic processes of birth and aging, is also permeated
with wishful thinking. There is a strong sense that Diablo Cody’s more
experienced persona is being brought out in the younger Juno character. This
anachronism is not the only way in which Juno
plays with our sense of time, for there is also the underlying idea that Juno and her
contemporaries (the sympathetic ones at least) are ageless, beyond age even,
and that they are possessed of an innate and
formidable wisdom from which they derive an immense self-assuredness. Hence we have
Juno’s declaration to her father that she has spent
one particular day “dealing with things beyond [her] maturity level”. Incidentally, this phrase
also figures in the film’s promotional material.
Arguably, it is the married
couple, of all the characters, who progress along the most radical transformational arc here. For the most
part, Juno manages the unexpected pregnancy according to her original plan and
we leave her in much the same place as we met her. (We understand that
she will be there for all time, sitting on the front lawn of
her suburban home, calling her friend on her novelty burger phone, eating liquorice and
slushees, and strumming through Mouldy Peaches covers with her
ageless boyfriend, while the high-school athletics team perform laps of the
running track ad infinitum. Which is all very reassuring, for some.)
I watched this film on DVD, and one
of the best features on the extras section is the joint commentary by writer
Cody and director Jason Reitman. One gets a good sense of Reitman’s attention
to detail, and can enjoy Cody's comments on her screenplay, such
as “I know if I was pregnant I’d play with my bump”. We also get an
insight into their dynamic as director and writer - when they discuss scripted
and non-scripted scenes, for example. Cody’s contribution to this commentary
suggests that her contribution to Juno was more important than Reitman’s, and
it’s a double act that’s worth catching, even for a short while.