Juno: The Review
Three-quarters of the way through Juno, an astonishing thing happened: the movie had already won. No matter how it ended, it would be satisfying to me, stepping quietly in to become one of the best movies I’d seen in either 2007 or 2008.
And here’s the thing: I actually had no idea how it was going to end. I just knew that it would have been impossible to deliver a bad ending. The lead character could have been killed in a drive-by shooting, and it still would have been decent.
That’s a very different experience from, say, I Am Legend, which had me firmly in its grip at 75% complete and then bobbled the ending a bit (or the ending to a movie like A.I. or Unbreakable, which had me totally and then fell dead on the ground come the credits). No, Juno had earned its love honestly, by making me care about all the characters.
Some wags have said that Juno is what Knocked Up would have been if it were written by a woman, and there are similarities, but I don’t think it’s that simple. The plot of Juno is simple: Juno, a pretty, independent, and odd sixteen-year-old, has sex with a friend of hers and gets pregnant. She doesn’t want the kid at all, but she’s squicked by abortion, so she decides to give it away to a nice middle-class couple.
That’s the framework for a lot of potential movies, ranging from the sad TV-Drama-Of-The-Week to a total larffest as the zany Juno deals with the whacky upper-class folks of Bel Air! But Juno bravely marks out its own territory, mainly because every person in the film is both perfectly cast and marvelously scripted.
The dad and his stepmom are characters in their own right – hard to do when the point of view is a teenaged girl – and the couple she wants to give the child to has their own relationship dynamic that could easily have been a movie on its own. Even the guy she had sex with, who she’s fallen away from but now has this thing to deal with, is delineated clearly. The writing is clear, mature, and precise, and even though it starts out as overly-stylized it soon settles down into that Tarantino-and-Smith territory where all the characters talk like you think you talk when you’re being off-the-cuff and witty.
I recently watched Knocked Up, another tale of unwanted pregnancy. What struck me about it the second time around was how little it bothered to go into the details of why these two would try to get together to raise a child. The main goal of Knocked Up was to stick two disparate characters together in a room and watch the fireworks fly (and, as I’ve noted in my original review, if that doesn’t happen then you don’t have a movie).
Some have called Knocked Up an anti-female movie, which I don’t think it is. It’s definitely a tale of the old boy’s club, to be sure, but frankly I (and most of the people who saw it with me) found Debbie’s character to be pretty sympathetic in the end because her husband was really standoffish and dickish. And most of the criticisms that Allison laid at the feet of Seth Rogan’s character turned out to be exactly true, making Knocked Up the story of a guy who really has to leave this childish shit behind.
No, Knocked Up is strange because it just doesn’t bother to explain why either of them would keep getting together. Seth Rogan’s clearly trading up lookswise, so we patently buy that he’d want to have sex with the hottie reporter… But realistically, he’d probably find her exasperating and awful in the short term, and aside from a vague desire to do good he has just as little reason to try to commit to her as she does to him. She’s antithetical to his lifestyle and his very temperament. We’re simply trained as a society to go, “Of course the ugly fat guy would want to commit to the cute girl for the rest of his life! That’s what they do when they get lucky enough to have a cute girl, any cute girl, pay attention to them!” Which is, in a sense, pretty sad.
Thing is, it wouldn’t have been too hard to show why Allison wants to be with Seth. It would have taken a two-minute scene somewhere showing what her past dating life had been and what need Seth would have filled in it that others had not. Yet that wasn’t there not because Judd Apatow can’t write good female characters, but because Judd Apatow just didn’t give a crap about either of their motivations.
What Knocked Up gives us is a lot of funny, and a lot of painfully realistic fights, but we never see what attracts these two misfits to each other… Which is really kind of a cheat, leaving the movie hollow at the center. I still like Knocked Up for what it is, which is very funny, but the end of the movie leaves me with the vague worry that we just spent two hours watching people make the exact wrong decisions.
Juno is not like that. The difference between Juno and Knocked Up is that the heart of Juno is very much about why these people want (or do not want) to be with each other, and everything else is secondary. Juno’s not thrilled with her stepmother, but now they’ve gotta work together a little harder. The parents-to-be of her child certainly have some differences with the lower-class family of Juno herself, but that’s gotta be worked out.
Which is why Juno works. Everyone has their own motivations, and even if you don’t agree with them, you always understand where they’re coming from.
Or not. One of the joys of writing Home on the Strange was watching people argue over what the characters were doing; I always knew I’d done something worthwhile when two people could see the exact same thing and come away with different interpretations of the motivations behind that scene. And this morning, Gini and I were arguing over what one of the people in Juno was really trying to do, hinging on one piece of dialogue – “I thought you’d be happy” - and neither of us could say for sure what that truly meant.
That’s why Juno won three-quarters of the way through. The ending wasn’t about what happened to these people, but rather about who these people were. The final plot dispositions were irrelevant, because I knew I was going to understand the core of Juno’s very being in a way that Knocked Up could never deliver. And that’s why it triumphs.
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