josh everett ryan

You can find proper music or film criticism all over the internet. Instead, in this series, I will review certain albums, films, and other artwork that is important to me. I will try to elucidate the feelings these works evoke for me, so we, both you and I, might appreciate these things together.

For a full explanation of this blog series, please click here.

Be advised, this post may contain spoilers.

When I first watched this movie, I really wanted to like it. But I guess I decided I wasn’t going to about ten minutes in. I heard the phrase “honest to blog” and cringed a little. The dialog struck me as wholly unrealistic. It was stylish, sure, but it also seemed to be trying too hard. I could see one character talking in nothing but cultural references and witticisms as character building. But if it’s the entire town, it can be annoying. So there I was, distracted by the dialog, turned off because it all sounded so… well, written.

Tonight, I watched JUNO again. This time, I loved it.

I bought it impulsively last week. It was paired with Little Miss Sunshine (a movie I adore, which I’ll review someday in the future, probably) for seven dollars. Yet even though it was cheap and came with a movie I knew I loved, something told me that I also needed to give Juno a second chance. I felt a strange sense of intuition, like I knew I’d like it if I just watched it again. I think maybe it’s because I sensed the poignancy of the plot the first time I watched it… when Vanessa, the overbearing woman who was dying for a child of her own, put her hand on Juno’s pregnant tummy and talked to the child she longed for so hard, I knew it was strong. I knew there was heart to this story even when I denied it years ago, but silly me was so hung up on the dialog and the style that I just refused to give myself up to the story. I was stupid.

This time, I cried.

Well, not at that part. I cried at the end, when Juno confessed her love to Paulie Bleeker. I can’t tell you if that makes it an especially poignant scene of this type, because I cry at pretty much all these sorts of scenes. I cry more than I should probably admit, because the testosterone police would probably break my door down if they even knew. But whatever. I’ve come to terms with the fact I cry easier than almost any woman I’ve ever met. And anyway, the scene was touching. This time, I gave myself up to this young girl who was so clearly lost and confused, like most teenagers, but dealing with something extraordinary. Even her slang and unabashed pretensions that annoyed me the first time became something else. They weren’t just a writer trying really, really hard to show the audience how cool she was. The slang became a defense mechanism for Juno, sheltering her emotions with clever punchlines and silly antics to deflect, deflect, deflect.

It helps that the movie even examines that yearning to be cool directly. The character Mark (Jason Bateman) is aching to be cool again. He resents the fact he was once a guitar player in an indie (or punk rock) band opening for the Melvins, and now he writes jingles for commercials and lives with a wife who keeps his things in boxes in another room. He’s become a yuppie, but he isn’t happy packing away his guitars and becoming boring and rich. So he hangs out with Juno, the sixteen-year-old girl who’s supposedly having their baby. They trade mix tapes (or is it just called burned CDs now?) and watch horror movies. There’s a palpable sense of tension and unease in scenes between Mark and Juno, not least because they always seemed to begin with, “is your wife around?” The heavy promise of an affair loomed around every corner of their giant house, in every scene they appeared alone.

Mark tells Juno he wants to leave his wife, and the fate of the baby is put into question. But Mark is surprised when Juno is angry. Juno is surprised Mark would do this to Vanessa, and to her. She even asks him to, “do me a solid and just stay with Vanessa.” When Vanessa comes home and sees Juno crying, Mark comes clean with his wife, and they fight. Mark wants to go off and be “Kurt Cobain,” and Vanessa doesn’t want to wait for him to fail. She just really wants a baby. In that moment, as Juno stands feet away from the bickering adults she once thought would be the perfect family, she sees Mark as pathetic. It’s not unfair for him to want to be himself, but it was wrong of him to lie and lie and lie to his wife with the promise of a family he wasn’t even ready for. He wants to be young and cool forever, but Juno, a sixteen-year-old girl, sees a grown man trying to be a teenager. On the drive home, she pulls off to the side of the road and breaks down. Then, a calmness washes over her. In that moment, she realizes… it’s time for her to grow up.

When Juno’s lost all faith in humanity and in the prospect of people being happy together for the rest of their lives, cue a touching scene between her father who tells her that you just need to find someone who loves you through all the highs and lows, for whoever you are, no matter what mood you’re in or if you’re ugly or pretty or… sixteen and pregnant. It’s a lovely scene that nicely strings the themes together.

It also helps that this is also a funny movie. After he found out Juno was pregnant, her father says he was wishing for “anything but this”… drug addiction, DWI, expulsion. It’s clear, biting satire of how parents treat unexpected pregnancies of their children. Paulie Bleeker is filled with fun lines, my personal favorite being: “That’s just her face.”

The atmosphere is engrossing. This small town felt like someplace I wish was real. The track team running through almost every outdoor frame, the funny weirdo at the little shop down the street, even the jocks seemed likable! (I don’t know if real jocks want arty girls. I never bothered to ask them when they were teasing me.) When Juno picked a purple flower out in the yard after her fight with Mark and Vanessa, she thought about how she always appreciated home more after she’d been gone for a while. It made me smile, because I’ve thought exactly the same thing time after time. I’m sure we all have.

When Paulie “just knew” the baby had come, so he ran up the bleachers right after the track meet, I smiled wide. When he laid beside Juno on the hospital bed, it just seemed right. It seemed like a perfect fit.

I love this movie now. The dialog may still seem too much like a script and less like a natural conversation, but the characters are all endearing in the end – well, mostly – and the heart of Juno’s story outshines all the oddities combined. It makes sense that once she stops deflecting responsibility and shrugging off her heavy dilemma, the quirky dialog slips into the background, and the power of her emotional journey radiates front and center, and the film is all the better for it.