A fiery hit at this year’s TIFF, Juno has been favorably compared to last year’s Little Miss Sunshine due to their similar word-of-mouth popularity and success story. Juno is also getting the wide critical acclaim and Oscar talk Little Miss Sunshine did. Here’s another comparison to add to the list, albeit one I humbly admit is minor compared to the previously mentioned accolades: I dislike both films.
But while Little Miss Sunshine turned me off with its predictability and its achingly forced offbeat characters—as in, there’s not enough original wit—Juno suffers from an overload of it.
Much of the praise seems to be directed at the writing, which isn’t surprising. Jason Reitman, who showed a visual flair in Thank You For Smoking, opts for a more conventional dialogue-heavy shots here, but has fine attention to detail in the kids\' accessories and room decoration—the only thing that feels authentic in the entire film.
Sure, the characters are all way too quick and smart to be believable—adolescent conversations are never this witty—but that’s not the problem. To me, comedy is all about the pay-off to the build up. Stand-up comedians like Bill Hicks and Lewis Black would spend forever ranting about something—sometimes funny, sometimes not—and then cap it off with a satisfying punchline. Obviously, screen comedy is a different breed, but it’s still the same mechanics when you’re telling a funny story (notice that the bad stand-up acts are always the ones who jump into jokes and funny statements right off the bat). Juno depends its laughs not on comic situations or humorous banter, but rather its ability to make up clever idioms and using words like “homeskillet” and “wizard.” Then, to ensure a consistent stream of laughs, Juno packs every scene with those idioms, ad nauseam.
The premise itself isn’t bad. It’s not the most engaging plot imaginable, but it’s serviceable. The problem is that the film is less interested with what interesting/funny scenes it can create from the plot than it is with what the characters can say next.
It would’ve worked much better as a book or, more appropriately for this generation, a running blog—since the whole film lays its foundation on catchphrases and play-on-words rather than characters. By the end of the film, I never wanted to hear any of these people speak a single word again. Which is not to be derisive towards the cast, but none of the core characters are even particularly likable. There’s only so much you can take of that “I’m saying lame things ironically and it’s cool because I know it’s lame and it’s deliberate” neo-retro-age shtick before the English language implodes on itself.
Ellen Page plays the pregnant Juno, whose snarky MySpace generation teen sarcasm will either delight you or provoke you to do something terribly vindictive, like tagging her name to photos of a walrus on Facebook. Michael Cera, playing the nerdy father of the baby, is pleasing doing the same thing he’s known for, but underutilized, as his character disappears for most of the film. Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman are the adoptive yuppie parents of Juno’s future baby. Garner’s character seems oddly confrontational and Bateman’s is a louse. They’re not even interesting until their subplot kicks in halfway into the film, at which point there was nothing much left to do with them. Most sympathetic are Juno’s parents, played by J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney, both of whom have better comic timing than all the other actors, but (like Cera) are sadly underused.
It was probably a great screenplay to read, but it’s an ear-sore to listen to. Diablo Cody is obviously a talented writer to be able to come up with this dialogue, but somewhere along the line, perhaps a filtering system was needed. Movie dialogue doesn’t need to be realistic, but they do need to have a sense of order to them. Maybe I’m being too harsh, and a lot of people would say so, but the fact is when the humor rubbed me the wrong way like this, it’s hard to find it funny. Juno just sounds like a bunch of hipsters reading each other’s novelty t-shirts. There’s something cute about the concept of the shirt, but wearing it and reading it aloud is just sad. Not to mention annoying.
Incidentally, I was given a Juno t-shirt that has a random line from the movie written on it, and I found looking at the t-shirt funnier than the actual line in the movie. Go figure.
"Juno" opens December 5, 2007 and is rated PG13. Comedy. Directed by Jason Reitman. Written by Diablo Cody. Starring Allison Janney, Ellen Page, JK Simmons, Jason Bateman, Jennifer Garner, Michael Cera, Olivia Thirlby.
