Juno is like that friend you have that you really like hanging out with, but there’s something that annoys the crap out of you. Maybe they’re a terrible drunk, or in this case, far too enamored of their own jokes. I can’t think of another movie that I like as much as this one, but at the same time drives me so far up the wall.
Juno (Ellen Page) isn’t your typical teenage girl. She’s smart and tough and, oh yeah, pregnant. After having sex with her best friend the young girl gets knocked up and decides that the best course of action is to give the child up for adoption. After finding a couple, Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman, Jennifer Garner), in the local penny saver, Juno meets with them and all the details are worked out. Juno spends the next nine months getting to know the couple, but everyone finds that the birth of a child can lead to unexpected revelations.
Okay, so what’s my beef with Juno? Well it’s pretty much the same complaint everyone has: the dialogue. It isn’t so much that the title character is smart and quick witted, that’s fine. I’m sure there are smart kids out there, somewhere. My problem is with all the “look how clever this is” pop culture references. I’m just not buying there are sixteen year old girls listening to Iggy and the Stooges, Mott the Hoople, espousing the greatness of Dario Argento while making off the cuff one-liners about Soupy Sales. All that without ever having heard of Sonic Youth. And I don’t even like Sonic Youth. Yeah, I said it. What our writer of the moment Diablo Cody is really doing here is showing us how cool she is via her character almost to the detriment of the film. Taking the things a thirty year old would say or is into, and laying them on a kid just doesn’t fly.
Now you may to yourself “Man, this guy sure has his head up his ass.” I probably do, but I don’t like it when people name drop things just to do it. For example in the movies' pivotal scene Juno brings a Mott the Hoople album to Mark and plays the track “All the Young Dudes.” He says that he knows the song and he danced to it at his prom. Aside from the fact that I’d be surprised if that song were ever played at a school dance, but what teenage boy is going to dance to a song called “All the Young Dudes?” More than that, what Cote is betting on here is that you, the viewer, aren’t familiar with the song. Since I’m one of two people pretentious enough to walk around with an iPod loaded down with Mott the Hoople albums, I know that song came out in 1972, which would make Mark over 50 now and near 40 when he was a hip grunge musician. Now I realize that there are things like this in movies all time and generally I overlook them. But when you try to show how much smarter you are than everyone else by assuming that they are too stupid to get what you’re talking about, I get annoyed. Frankly, it’s condescending and lazy writing to force the reference in that way.
All of that is just annoying. Where it becomes a flaw, is with Juno herself. All the humor in this film comes from one-liners that don’t resonate in the least. Not one laugh is truly earned and there is no build up and release at all. It’s just a serious of tough gal pop culture references. We spend an hour seeing how tough Juno is and how smart she is. All of a sudden, when it’s appropriate to the plot, suddenly she’s just a weak little sixteen year old girl who doesn’t know anything about how the world works. Now I would like to say that this a case of her personality being a act to cover up vulnerability, and in a weak moment the mask cracks and we see Juno’s true colors, but that simply isn’t the case. You can’t have her be wise beyond her years and able to make it on her own and at the same time be a naïve kid, especially not without developing the character that way. Otherwise what you have is a plot contrivance.
