juno (2007)

Could there be a film that opens so abysmally and yet ends up being such a good film? 20 minutes into Juno I was ready to leave. I should preface this by saying that I am not a fan of the TV show The Gilmore Girls. I simply don't believe rapid-fire, name-dropping perpetual banter is funny, or even smart. It is noisy and very very false. No kidding, Juno begins with nearly 20 minutes of absolutely miserable dialog and characterization. It is as if the film is being strangled by the hip irony that it eventually frees the main character from. Every line, every move, every character is a cookie cutter of what 50 year old executives think 'indie' and high school should be. But then something happens...

By the end of the scene where Juno, her parents and the adoptive couple meet, something resembling reality sets in. The mis-en-scene is still a direct lift of Wes Anderson's handmade aesthetic (aren't all indie films?), but director Jason Reitman doesn't employ Anderson's intellectual and distancing camera work. Instead he fumbles through a few false starts by trying to introduce a voice similar to Thank You for Smoking's first person narration with quick cut post-modern asides, and then abandons it entirely, creating a film which retains very little narrative artifice.

In fact, once it hits its stride, Juno is just what a film should be: completely effortless. There are all sorts of moments in the film that threaten to be sentimental or preachy or cliche, but somehow the film finds a way to escape its worst tendencies. I believe this all to be a function of dichotomy. With characters that are mired in artifice as revealed by speech, music, relationships, the only way to succeed is by placing them in a story conflict that even the most composed or false characters must react genuinely to. Juno is simply the story of a character who is forced to be real, and to reevaluate what and who around her has actual value.

I didn't think much of Juno as a comedy, but as a character-driven story, I enjoyed it immensely.