…yet made of stars

Call it a fertile year for Hollywood. Hee hee.

Yeah, okay. I’m pretty sure that pun set a new record for awfulness, but somehow 2007 has yielded not one, but two, fantastic comedies about accidental pregnancy. The first, of course, was Knocked Up, a highly commercial farce from The Forty-year-old Virgin director Judd Apatow that somehow managed to rise above its childish, scatological humor and be a highly affecting comedic drama. The second is Juno, which turns out to be almost the exact opposite—a quiet indie film from director Jason Reitman (previously best-known for the equally brilliant Thank You for Smoking). You’d think pregnancy comedies would have been done to death by now (check out 1995’s Nine Months for evidence of that), but somehow Hollywood has managed to mine new gold from the old setup. And they did it the old-fashioned way (no test-tube babies here…hee hee…okay, I’ll stop): interesting storylines and well-developed characters.

Juno centers around the title character (Ellen Page), a laidback, sarcastic high school student who finds herself pregnant after a casual encounter with her “best friend” Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera, coincidentally fresh from the Apatow-produced Superbad). Seeking to deal with the pregnancy responsibly, she finds a wealthy childless couple who are looking to adopt (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) and signs the still-gestating baby over to them. In the meantime, though, she has to deal with her parents, morning sickness, school, and generally realizing how little she knows about life in general.

Or something like that. If it sounds like a thin premise for a movie, maybe it is—but to use the old, tired cliché, this film is more than the sum of its parts. Reitman is aiming here for low-key, character driven comedy, and he hits the mark dead-on. Page (X-men: The Last Stand) essentially carries the picture with hilarious teen-slang banter that falls somewhere in between Gilmore Girls and Napoleon Dynamite. The other characters do an excellent job as well, with one standout being J.K. Simmons as Juno’s father Mac—an old military retiree who comes off as gruff and obnoxious at first, but ultimately wins viewers over as his deep love for his daughter becomes clear. Bateman and Garner also put in top-notch performances—both of them as mostly unsympathetic, but infinitely complex characters that are compelling, even if you don’t particularly like them.

There’s also some social satire here, especially prevalent in a hilarious scene that skewers both the pro-life movement and Planned Parenthood (for those of you keeping score, the pro-life movement wins here—but then, if it hadn’t, there wouldn’t be much of a movie). It’s light, though, and for those characters who represent certain movements or demographics, their main purpose appears to be merely to give the nonchalant and unimpressed Juno something to riff on—which remains entertaining and hilarious throughout the entire film (Page deserves some sort of award here—but the Oscars consistently ignore comedies, so I’m not getting my hopes up).

What’s really being examined here is the human condition: the selfishness of people and their near inability to do something for anyone other than themselves. Though Juno is told throughout the film that she’s doing something “selfless” in giving her baby up, she repeatedly denies it, pointing out that she just doesn’t want to have to raise the thing herself. Garner’s character is bossy and overbearing, and obsessed with becoming a mother to a point of near-creepiness. Her husband is a rockstar-wannabe who fears fatherhood and refuses to grow up. Juno’s parents are both divorced and remarried. In a moment of frustration and honesty, Juno demands to know why relationships “are always so messed up and broken”. Indeed.

The marketing and promotional materials seem to imply that Fox Searchlight Pictures is hoping for lightning to strike twice—i.e., as it did with Napoleon Dynamite (and it seems it has, given the film’s box office receipts). The films are actually very different in origin—the former a being a production of some film students from Idaho, and the latter an independent film with a fairly established director and some notable stars—but are somewhat similar in tone, with their subtle visual imagery and their depiction of high school life that rings truer than most teen comedies (not to mention, of course, their bizarrely named title characters). Where Dynamite was a weirdly over-the-top farce, however, Juno is a much more subtle picture, and arguably a better one. Its comedy comes naturally from its believable characters, and its themes run deeper. It’s just as endlessly quotable, but it’ll stick with you longer, and maybe even make you think.