Reviews :
{ Rating: 4.0 out of 5 } | Juno - goddess of marriage and childbirth?
The people who like Juno outnumber those who don't 3 to 1. I'm in the minority. At times it's cute and amusing, and the acting is good. It's a quirky story filled with quirky characters, but even with all the quirks it is neither complex nor endearing.
Juno is a preternaturally intelligent, precocious, attractive 16-year-old teen who makes up her own rules. Apparently no one can control or even influence her, not her tough, gruff father, not her tough, gruff step-mother, not her school, not her best friend or her boyfriend. But before too long we discover that Juno cares too much, that her rude, tough, pushy, arrogant, disdainful, manipulative exterior is masking a real softie inside. How original is that?
To mix things up a bit, in a transparent effort to make up something "original" about the story, Juno decides one day to have sex with her boyfriend. Keep in mind that the most endearing quality about the boyfriend is that he is a totally passive pushover and is easily manipulated by Juno. It is Juno's idea to have sex, and when Juno says she wants sex, the boyfriend, Bleeker, has little say in the matter. Appropriately enough, the seminal act, as it were, is concluded not by smoking cigarettes, but by eating Tic Tacs (one of the many quirks of the film). Of course it was unprotected sex, because as I said, Juno makes up her own rules.
Juno gets pregnant and she decides to give the baby to a set of parents of her own personal choosing. Juno's father helps her with the interviews, apparently accustomed to letting his daughter have her way. Juno quickly finds the perfect couple, and she can't wait to dump the unwanted baby on them, almost as if she has found a family to take a pet dog she's had for a month and now has grown bored with. Throughout the pregnancy, Juno continues to be the rude, rule-breaking person she's always been, though here and there we see glimpses of her softer side. She mostly ignores her boyfriend, who never really was a boyfriend anyway.
The rest of the story is quite boring, the end is quite silly. But the movie is too earnest to be a comedy, though I have no idea what it is being earnest about. I don't think it's necessary to say more, except that, in the end, after the baby has been given away, Juno inexplicably decides that she, at 16, is suddenly in love with Bleeker, and no one is more surprised than Bleeker himself. It seems that even though Juno prefers to make up her own rules and break everyone else's, there is, after all, one rule that she would like to believe in: the rule of happily ever after. And if that doesn't make sense after what I've described before, it's not supposed to. :-)
For those of you looking for a good, earnest, quirky movie about first love, I would suggest The Sterile Cuckoo with Liza Minnelli. It's an old movie (1969) and may be hard to find. The novel by John Nichols is good, too. |
