I have very, very mixed feelings about Jason Reitman’s Juno.
I hated the first hour and ten minutes of it. The last thirty minutes? Not bad, but also nothing to write home about.
The film follows 16-year-old Juno MacGuff, played by Elliot Page, who discovers she is pregnant after sleeping with her friend Paulie Bleeker, played by Michael Cera. Juno decides against abortion and instead seeks out Mark and Vanessa Loring, played by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner, who agree to adopt Juno’s soon-to-be child. Vanessa is over the moon at the prospect of becoming a mother. Mark? Not so much. As the pregnancy progresses, Juno struggles with her feelings for Paulie, and the entire adoption is nearly called off after Mark and Vanessa have a falling out. But things turn out alright in the end.
Of course, a lot of bullshit happens along the way.
To be honest, I struggle to understand why Juno won an Academy Award. I thought Page’s performance, which captured Juno’s irreverence, hardheadedness, and unconventionality, was outstanding. I also thought that several of the scenes near the end of the film were vaguely moving.
However, not only did I dislike the film’s overall tone, I couldn’t find anything to like about it whatsoever. Did anyone think Juno was funny? I know it’s supposed to be funny, but only because it says it’s a comedy on Amazon Prime Video. My guess is that Reitman was going for a kind of indie-ironic vibe by having the high school characters talk like Internet memes and use phones shaped like hamburgers, but all of it just fell flat. The dialogue? It’s trying so goddamn hard to be funny, but it’s just weird and random.
It felt like Reitman was trying too hard. Chill out, dude. Ease up on the ridiculous dialogue. Ease up on the ironic jokes. Ease up on the behaviors that don’t fit the situation at hand.
Ok, you got me.
I said I had mixed feelings about the film. But yes, I didn’t like it very much.
Basically everything about it rubbed me the wrong way.
And the plot had so much potential, too. If Reitman was able to successfully combine the drama of teenage pregnancy with genuine humor, Juno could have been something great.
But I just don’t think it did. I don’t think the personal impact and implications of Juno’s pregnancy are well explored, and, as I said, I thought the film was decidedly unfunny.
Page won Best Actress for his role as Juno. Understandably so. He played the role exceptionally well. But I think Juno wasn’t a great character to begin with, irrespective of Page’s performance. Yet again, Reitman and company tried too hard. Juno couldn’t just be unique. She had to be unique. UNIQUE. You end up with a character whose words and actions are totally unrelatable and even unrecognizable.
Juno’s personality, of course, was supposed to be the film’s primary comedic gimmick. Wow, look at how distinctive and unusual this 16-year-old girl is! Listen to the random shit she says, how she doesn’t give a fuck what others think!
Ok, we get it. Juno is a special snowflake. Now what?
She gets together with Paulie, of course. In fact, she loves him.
Who could’ve seen it coming? Definitely not me. Although Paulie is the father to Juno’s child, he is an ancillary character whose thoughts, emotions, and motivations are barely, if ever, explored. He’s completely uninvolved in Juno’s pregnancy, and it just didn’t make sense that the film ultimately resolves as a romance between two characters who barely interacted throughout its runtime.
That being said.
As I said previously, the last thirty minutes of the film weren’t bad. There’s a transition from (attempted) comedy into drama, and I definitely preferred the latter to the former. The final scene with Juno, Mark and Vanessa at the Loring home is, in my opinion, the best the film has to offer.
I also thought the relationship between Mark and Vanessa was compelling. The two are polar opposites, but Bateman and Garner play off each other well. I wish the film had done more to explore their eventual rupture.
Most importantly, when all is said and done, what I disliked most about Juno was its vibe. And who the hell knows what vibe is, anyway? It’s definitely not an objective criterion upon which to judge a piece of media. It a matter of personal preference, nothing more, nothing less.
But here’s a statement that is objectively true:
I currently have a lot of free time on my hands.