Juno

It's interesting to see that the marketing for Juno centers around its screenwriter, fancifully named Diablo Cody, who was previously best known as a writer of a memoir about being a stripper. It's kind of a surefire thing, identifying anyone as an ex-stripper, or even more vividly, a pole-dancer.
This is Cody's first screenplay, and it shows, but it is also evident of a great talent.

The tale is that of a sixteen-year-old girl who manages to get pregnant the first and only time she has sex, with her best friend, a meek boy. She chooses to give up the baby for adoption, and she sort of adopts herself the yuppie couple who she finds in an ad in the penny saver. There's not really much conflict along the way, as Cody likes her characters too much to put them through much sturm and drang, and instead focuses her abilities on the dialogue.

Oh, the dialogue. You see, Juno, our heroine, is the kind of verbally gifted teen whom we've seen before in TV shows like Dawson's Creek and The Gilmore Girls--impossibly pop-culturally saturated for their years. Juno's lines are a patois of suburban hip-hop and a kind of His Girl Friday rat-a-tat which is as dizzying as it is funny. It's difficult to cite any examples because they all fly by so fast that the last bon mot pushes out of the memory the one that came before it. A few words stand out, though, as the rules of the FCC precluded Rory Gilmore from using words like, "pork-sword" and "vag."

Also, there are some times in the script that are just amateurish, like when Juno's step-mother (Allison Janney) gets ticked at an ultrasound technician, and the big speech by Juno's dad (J.K. Simmons) which basically says look for someone who loves you for yourself. Jeez, I never thought of that! There are also some plot inconsistencies--at the beginning of the film, Juno is buying a pregnancy test in a store within earshot of everyone, including the store clerk, who teases her about it and calls her homeskillet (?) But then later she's worried about her parents and her schoolmates finding out she's pregnant. And it's never discussed how a couple of intelligent kids forego birth control. A line about a condom breaking would have been nice.

If Cody likes all her characters, she is most fond of Juno herself, who at times seems like an alien dropped into our world. She has the bemused father, and the step-mother whose patience has its limits, and her impregnator, played by Michael Cera, tries hard to keep up with her. After his role earlier this year in Superbad, Cera has cornered the market on awkward but sensitive teenage boys. For all of Juno's linguistic acrobatics, I thought that Cera's character was perhaps the most accurately written. He marvels at Juno, but isn't quite sure how to win her, and one's heart breaks a little every time one sees him running in his track outfit.

As the yuppie parents-to-be, Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman are also fine. Garner is a woman pushed to the edge by the inability to procreate and previous disappointments trying to adopt, while her husband retains his adolescence and manages to bond with Juno over shared interests in rock music and horror films. It's a decision he makes that provides the fulcrum on which the plot turns.

Of course, though, the film belongs to Ellen Page in a star-making turn as Juno. I haven't seen her other starring role in Hard Candy, and thus my only exposure to her is her fleeting turn as Kitty Pryde in the last X-Men film. She is a pint-sized performer that packs a giant wallop, though, handling Cody's lines like a master juggler. She manages to be both winsome and brittle. Her character has been fussily created, down to her favorite bands, the pictures in her school locker, and the ironic t-shirts she wears, but Page takes all that information and breathes life into her.

I should add that some of the credit must go to director Jason Reitman, who seems to be ignored in a lot of the publicity, maybe because he was never a stripper. He is a fine director, though, and following Thank You For Smoking, which I thought was dandy, he has become someone who work I will look forward to seeing.