Juno (2007): a Review
Well, well, well -looks like it’s that time of year again! The most glorious time of year for disassociating children and emotionally hyper responsive young adults alike! C’est Halloween, a celebration of the inherent darkness that maintains the societal axis that-along with the burning sun-maintains our neoliberal ideals and the moist air that eternally grazes our decaying flesh. It’s the one night a year when a girl can hide razor blades in apples and no other girls can say anything about it.
So, in accordance with the theme of this issue, I will be reviewing a true relic of our 2-for-1 graphic t’s past; a film, that, in just 96 minutes, wholeheartedly captures the unregulated darkness that makes Halloween, Halloween. And that is ladies and gentle-spookers, 2007’s sleeper-hit Juno.
Juno is a quirky film that centres around noted Canadian lesbian person Ellen Page as the titular Juno McGuff -a wisecracking sixteen-year-old Minnesotan flannel-wearer whose otherwise all-American adolescence is turned upside down and right-side up when she discovers that she’s pregnant. Fortunately-well as fortunate as teen pregnancy gets-the father of her baby is her adorkable “it’s complicated” guy friend Paulie Bleeker, played by Michael Cera, in his most quintessential Michael Cera role to date.
God. 2007 Michael fucking Cera was like a newborn puppy whose temporary blindness somehow makes it even more cute and non-threatening. Not in that misogynistic, “you’re beautiful because you don’t know it,” kind of way, except in a -a newborn puppy kind of way.
Anyhoo, the film averts clichéd territory by presenting Juno as a teenage girl whose complex personhood is repeatedly shown to exist beyond the black/white, civilized/primitive binary-contingent approach of thinking that rick rolled working-class white people into voting for Trump.
It’s a multifaceted ideology that, once in a while, pushes you to actually believe that consciously splitting from loved ones before they can abandon you is a logical idea. That, in that moment, exhuming that eight-year-old inside-the one in the Pikachu costume-that had to bury to endure, will make the inevitable heartache any more cathartic.
One that wants, so, so much, to believe that tricking will bring treat. So, so, much.
It’s that muffled-but all-too-clear-voice that tells you to be careful who you expose your truest self to. Yes, that one, the one that makes you think that you feel as if you know. It gives words to a subjectively reality that hits before it objectively happens. In a smoke-covered room, with textbooks-opened but unread-covering the merlot-stained fluorescent beige carpeting, seating a cackling friend, and an old MacBook Pro playing a clip of a child filming their hamster eating a baby it just birthed. In the second it takes for the nakedness of one another’s truth to be nourished and content; it takes just a second for the flash of that Kodiak moment to make it known.
To make known what you already know, that to know you, is to be dismayed. You forgot to trick, but the treat is still fixed in an uncontainable sabbatical that’s already been planned.
I won’t spoil it for you -just in case you’re reading this and still haven’t watched Juno in the ten years that it’s been available to rent. I will say that Juno and Michael Cera’s relationship, as adorkable as it is, does crumble as the film progresses due to a similar scenario. Though, instead of having SBTRKT playing in the background, it features an upbeat-sounding, nihilistically-lyricized folky soundtrack that could make a song describing the 1980s HIV/AIDs crisis sound fun and flowery. Zooey Deschanel’s band “She & Him” is not featured, but like, it sounds like they are -you know?
Aside from that, the music really does the impossible, in that it is able to make Michael Cera circa 2007 even more adorkable than he was without the music. When Michael Cera croons “The monkey on your back is the latest tre-end?” acoustic guitar, or ukulele, or whatever the fuck? Honestly.
But, unlike Michael Cera, Juno’s mere on-screen presence can make even a high-strung Jennifer Garner, who plays Gwenyth Paltrow’s understudy in real life, sound like a nonsensical cartoon mom from Charlie Brown’s Peanuts universe. This does not deter from the actuality that, noted Canadian lesbian person Ellen Page, is undeniably playing a sixteen-year-old-not-a-girl-not-yet-a-woman. No amount of ironic hamburger phones or time spent non-ironically reading penny saver advertisements can conceal that Juno’s consciousness occupies an ephemeral space that is seamlessly capable of rejecting the snake-eating-its-own-tail vapidity of consumer-based identity (the smelly soup girl that stink eyes Juno), and in the next scene, succumb to the intoxicating grasp of youthful naivety and idealism that temporarily allows her to invent a false imaginary where her friendship with Jason Bateman is in any way appropriate.
To put it differently, the realistic aspects of Juno’s plot combined with its titular protagonist’s understated irritation with simply being inspires even the most self-confident twentysomething to re-examine the reassuring sense of superiority they felt at thirteen when they called their mom by her first name [Beth] after she refused to buy them tickets to Billy Talent.
All things considered, Juno is an underrated holiday classic that, when carefully analysed, unearths the unsettling foundation of Halloween season, and figuratively hurls it-earthworms and all-at the viewer’s face. Its message carries the spookiest revelation of all; it’s that even an objectively cool kid such as Juno McGuff who can probably make someone like you cry in real life by responding to anything you say with “WOW, DREAM BIG!” is wearing a costume. Just like the rest of us. We’re all wearing costumes. Society’s costumes.
I give Juno four-and-a-quarter 2010 live-action Scott Pilgrim’s out of five 2007 Michael Cera’s.