JUNO

By Michael Phillips
It takes “Juno” about 15 minutes to calm down and get its joke reflex in check. Screenwriter Diablo Cody, formerly Brook Busey-Hunt, has everyone quipping like maniacs—it’s dialogue you notice, every second—and for a while you wonder if this story of a pregnant teenager’s coming of age will exhaust you with cleverness. Then, stealthily, everything about the movie starts working together more purposefully. And by the end you’ve fallen in love with the thing.
Ellen Page is key to its success, as much as Cody, or director Jason Reitman. Previously Reitman made “Thank You For Smoking,” and while that was satire and this a comic fable in the key of Quirk, he brings a similarly bright look, feel and snap to the proceedings. Page stars as 16-year-old Juno MacGuff, a suburban Twin Cities kid (the city’s never mentioned by name, but surrounding communities such as Stillwater and St. Cloud are) living with her sister, her father and her stepmother in relative harmony. The heroine resembles MTV’s sardonic Daria Morgendorffer, only sunnier. When we first see her, she’s glugging from a huge container of Sunny D in order to facilitate a urine test, part of a home pregnancy kit. It comes up positive. The father, still a boy, is a nice guy on the track team played by Michael Cera from “Arrested Development” and “Superbad.” Page and Cera are magically right together, and as much as Cody’s script, the leading actors make “Juno” mean something in emotional terms. This is a tale of two kids who have sex for the first time with momentous consequences, and while Cody’s impulse as a writer is to mask her characters’ insecurities and fears with banter, at her best she can hit two or even three notes at once.
Juno’s father (J.K. Simmons) and stepmother (Allison Janney) are thrown by the pregnancy but supportive of her decision to see it through to term. The perfect adoptive parents emerge in the form of Vanessa (Jennifer Garner), an image-conscious, slightly prickly suburbanite, and her composer husband, Mark (Jason Bateman). Here, Cody settles for some easy, familiar shorthand, painting this couple’s lifestyle—which Mark is secretly, then openly, rebelling against—as stultifying. We’ve been there before, in “American Beauty” and a lot of other pictures. Yet Cody and director Reitman surprise us: Trading in archetypes that predate the oeuvre of John Hughes, even, they upend our expectations just enough to engage us in plot terms. Reitman doesn’t dig deeply, exactly. Nor does Cody. But Page and Cera are such marvels of easygoing, easy-breathing skill, “Juno” keeps getting better and better.
Everyone’s just right in it: Page and Olivia Thirlby, who plays her teacher-idolizing pal, really do seem like best friends of equal smarts and empathy. Simmons and Janney are exactly who you need for these gently idealized parental units.
Even if you resist some of the easy-listening ditties on the soundtrack, or the made-for-TV animated opening credits, Page ensures that everything that’s good and funny and fresh in the material comes through. If few 16-year-olds actually deal with first-time, whoopsie-daisy pregnancy with this much elan, well, that’s what movies are for, even modest comedies—to show us the possible.

*** 1/2
Cast: Ellen Page; Michael Cera; Jennifer Garner; Jason Bateman; Allison Janney; J.K. Simmons; Olivia Thirlby
Running time: 1:31.
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for mature thematic material, sexual content and language).

-Chicago Tribune