It took me quite a bit of time to write a review for the movie Juno. Part of this might be because, in very many annoying ways, the film is indistinguishable from other movies about teenaged pregnancy. Juno is flogged with cliché scenes like ‘telling your mom and dad you’ve screwed up’ and ‘walking through the crowded high school hallway while everyone stairs your big belly.’ But, if you want to convince yourself that Juno is revolutionary like most of the world has, just keep telling yourself how great it is that the movie is written by a former stripper and that Juno keeps her baby.

Juno desperately tries to tout a leading character with high merit – oh yes, Juno decides not to get sucked into the evils of abortion in favor of giving her accidental baby up for adoption; she even eagerly pursues her baby’s prospective parents herself when at least one of them starts to have second thoughts. But Juno’s virtue seems askew against the background of the rest of her character; a personality which seems completely void of the type of integrity inherent in any young woman (raised in a reasonably safe and functional environment) about her sexuality and femininity.

The movie opens up to Juno having an obnoxiously open conversation with a skeezy drug store clerk about her urine; Juno had been taking pregnancy tests off the shelf and into the store’s bathroom all morning while candidly and embarrassingly sharing the results with the clerk and his overbearingly overwritten wit. This guy is just the first of a slew of minor characters who are unbelievably horrible at acting (Juno’s baby daddy Bleeker’s mother is another.) But in all fairness to the performers, I suppose that this script was a little more difficult to navigate than your average teenage indie angst film because it is awfully, terribly written.

The never ending, so-not-grounded-in-reality dialogue in this film is enough to make anyone nauseous with morning sickness. Juno’s lines are especially over the top gregarious; she has a comeback for absolutely everything anyone else says, particularly that dialogue which does not require any sort of counter conversation at all. No one could possible be this quick with her mind-to-mouth capacities in absolutely any and all situations; if Juno really were this swift, she would have been able to utter ‘put on a condom’ even while in the grips of adolescent passion.

Here’s the thing: this movie isn’t all that bad, because some of the acting is quite brilliant. Jennifer Garner’s performance as the young woman most eager to adopt Juno’s baby is quite touching and sincere. The real star of the show though is Michael Cera, who is absolutely genius in his portrayal of the accidental father, the innocent seeming teenaged boy who doesn’t look before he leaps. Unfortunately, some of Cera’s lines are silly and it seems he can’t help but stumble over them; when Juno announces she is pregnant he utters (quite awkwardly) something very dumb about how, naturally, pregnant Juno will have a baby ‘just like their moms and teachers do when they get pregnant too.’ It seems Cera knew his character better than writer Diablo Cody, who consistently babies and degrades her script’s teenaged subjects.

The soundtrack to Juno is quite stellar, though, in the fashion of other indies past like Garden State, Juno has been entirely padded with good sound to stuff over the shaky content. In just the first ten minute’s of the film, a pretty handful of the soundtrack’s best sounds are leashed out on the audience in a pretty desperate effort to suck them all in.

One final thing; if wardrobe had been doing their job, Juno would have been pretty gross and fat by the end of this film. Juno’s starts off the movie chugging gallons of sugar-laden Sunny D in order to produce for her pregnancy tests, and throughout regular intervals during the rest of the film, she is stuck to a very large Seven Eleven Slurpee. Just because Juno doesn’t brush her hair (and boy did I wish she would have) doesn’t mean she looks real. Pregnancy doesn’t just come with the huge psychological consequences contemplating adoption vs. abortion and the incessant desire to complain about morning sickness and heartburn; it comes with some serious skin issues like acne and stretch marks and a whole fun-full of added pounds. I would have liked this movie a great deal more if I had seen some of that.

Liz Licorish

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