Hamburger Phone + Juno = Love

At the beginning of Jason Reitman’s Juno with all of it’s hip dialogue and quirky characters, you smell blood in the water. You’re thinking the film will be crushed by the weight of it all, but something happens as the seconds roll on… it becomes about something. Juno is one of the few films I know of that treats teen pregnancy, or just pregnancy in general in an honest fashion. I know it may be hard to see at first with all of is quirky artifice, but it’s there I tell you.

While everyone are on their A game in the film, the very best performances are by Ellen “Tiny Dynamo” Page and Jennifer Garner. Poor Garner is overlooked in the reviews I’ve read by Ellen Page, probably rightfully so (she‘s that good!), but she really deserves notice for a bringing alive a character that that we initially don’t like but come to really love as the picture progresses.

Ellen Page is on fire in the picture. By the end of the film you want to put her in your pocket and protect her from the cold. Cute as a bug!

Page sells Cody’s dialogue with ease. It could have turned into disaster in the hands of another actress with less talent for delivery. There is a fine line between hip and overindulgence. A much harder performance to pull of than Julie Christie’s very good performance in Away from Her.

The criticism I’ve often heard about Juno concerns the dialogue by screenwriter Diablo Cody.

“I am sick of people thinking they know what teenagers are. It's BS. For some reason, everyone now classifies teenagers as the jocks/preps or the social outcasts who are funny because they're quick witted. That's ridiculous! I am a teenager, so I do have a pretty good opinion on this. No one I have ever met talks like that. I wish people would stop writing these awful movies about people they don't understand. You really want to know the best teenager movie I've ever seen is? This is the point where you stop reading because you are going to go nuts over what I am about to say. Seriously, stop reading. You won't be able to handle the truth and will make a crack at my maturity...But the best teenager movie that actually does relate to people is Superbad. Yeah, I know...Superbad, but seriously that is how people talk. And guess what? They wrote that when they were teenagers. So, tell the whores to stop writing awful screen plays and let real writers do the work. I don't want any more crap from people who just don't understand what they're writing about.”

Some viewers point out like this one from IMDB that sixteen year-old girls don’t speak like the character Juno and certainly they’re right, but what they fail to grasp is that Juno obviously takes place in a hyper pop-reality much in the same way Charles Schultz approached his comic strip Peanuts. If you want reality rent a documentary. In no way is Reitman and Cody striving for teenage realism, but they are going for an emotional truth, and a lot of Juno rings true.

Juno is one of the best films of 2007 and deserves all of it’s accolades.