I feel like I missed the point in my life where I should have watched Juno. I’m not old, not by a long shot, but the vision of Jason Reitman feels a bit shallow now that my brain isn’t thriving off of comedies that came from the mid-2000s. The glory days are over, and right before it ended came Juno, an early Ellen Page vehicle that shows its titular character deal with a sudden pregnancy. I had assumed my genuine hatred and disinterest in children, childbirth and pregnancies would make it difficult to really care for the premise or characters within Juno, but then I remembered Diablo Cody had written this, and it’d be the shoddy writing stopping me from caring, rather than my hatred of all things.
Cody’s writing does in fact work, to some degree. Reitman’s early directing work combines a talented cast with a Wes Anderson like approach, diluted and strained into a jittery, somewhat likeable film. There are more issues than one would first expect, but Juno is actually rather funny, and that’s more than enough for me. You wade through reams of shoddy character building, items that don’t pay off in the end of this rather predictable piece, but you are rewarded with some great lines of dialogue and pockets of laugh out loud moments. These moments are few and far between, there are often long pauses between these funny moments, it really makes you question how worthwhile Juno actually is.
The characters found within Juno are mere caricatures. No moment strikes any of the supporting cast as more than surface level, conventional pillars to a story that doesn’t have all that much depth to begin with. Jason Bateman, in particular, plays a role tailor-made to him, but his direction and conviction feels aimless, a dumbed-down version of Michael Bluth from Arrested Development, who has a love for gory horror movies and Mott the Hoople. Paired with Jennifer Garner, the two play Mark and Vanessa Loring, the couple looking to adopt Juno’s future child. Pooling together three personality traits to be shared between the two, Garner and Bateman don’t grow as characters, they mull around in the background of an angsty teenage drama piece that just so happens to touch upon the relative horrors of pregnancy.
Not as sharp as it pretends to be, Juno strives for a touching story of maturing suddenly, but finds itself lost in a sea of meandering supporting roles that don’t ever fulfil themselves as anything more than a distraction from a lead narrative that can be wrapped up in about half an hour. Still, I find myself hard-pressed to hate Juno, because those aforementioned moments of humour do strike me as original, funny and well worth watching for those bits alone. A comfortable watch that won’t tax the mind, sometimes we need a film like that, and Juno finds itself in amongst that classification.
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