Sixteen-year-old Juno (like the goddess not the city in Alaska) and her best friend Bleeker get bored one night and do what comes naturally, namely having sex in an armchair. Nine weeks, two litres of Sunny D and three positive pregnancy tests later, Juno (Ellen Page) has to come to terms with being just another teen pregnancy statistic. Unable to face an abortion after learning her unborn foetus has fingernails, Juno decides on adoption and soon finds apparently perfect potential parents, Mark and Vanessa (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner).

Much praise has been heaped on Juno’s script, the debut screenplay of ex-stripper and infamous blogger Diablo Cody, and a substantial amount of it is well deserved. Unlike so many quirky, coming of age, indie films, Juno has an engaging and well structured plot and is laugh out loud funny in places. Unfortunately the dialogue of the eponymous Juno feels forced and frequently grates, as do the self-conciously cool music and pop culture references. Then again, you’d have to expect a certain amount of pretension from someone who’s come up with the pen name Diablo Cody.

Ellen Page more than deserves her Oscar nomination, if only for making the verbally avant-garde Juno a sympathetic heroine. More interesting than the slightly unbelievable, titular teenage mother, are Bateman and Garner as the buttoned down, childless couple, residents of the appropriately named ‘Glacial Valley Estates’. As cracks start to show they both produce layered and interesting performances and audience sympathies shift in unexpected ways. The real stand-out though, is long distance running, orange tic-tac loving, father-to-be Michael Cera, who is so darn loveable you just want to take him home and make him soup.

This isn’t the first time director Jason (son of Ivan) Reitman has dealt with a potentially controversial subject: the hero of his debut feature Thank you for Smoking was a lobbyist for the tobacco industry. Like that film, Juno approaches its subject matter in a refreshingly intelligent and witty way, avoiding being patronising or didactic. So much so that it would be easy to accuse it of skirting around, or even deliberately avoiding, the wider issues of Juno’s circumstances. Ultimately though, Juno is supposed to be a comedy, not an after-school special, and on those terms it suceeds admirably.

 

 

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