Graham Greene’s 17-year-old gangster, Pinky, the hero of
Brighton Rock (1938), was said to know “everything in
theory, nothing in practice.” He could have been the prototype for
the age of cool that was to come along a generation later with the
Beats and their successors in the 1960s. Pinky of course, had a
good reason to want to keep his innocence well hidden from the
fellow gang members who looked to him for leadership, but the
postwar reign of cool began when innocence became, in principle and
simply as such, something to be ashamed of. Back in those days —
which now themselves seem quite innocent — it was principally sex
that kids wanted to be knowing about, but now sexual sophistication
can be taken for granted even in quite young teenagers. That’s why,
today, the efforts of the cool-culture to root out such forlorn
remnants of innocence as may still survive in the caves and
mountain hideouts of our cultural sophistication have had to become
more inventive.
That is the message of Juno, directed by Jason Reitman
and written by Diablo Cody, the nom de strip of a former
exotic dancer who brings a perfect celebrity resume as well as a
sharp wit to her first produced screenplay. Sixteen-year-old Juno
MacGuff (Ellen Page) gets pregnant by her clueless high school
boyfriend, Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), decides to have the child
and give it up for adoption, herself picks the childless couple,
Mark and Vanessa (Jason Bateman, Jennifer Garner), to whom she
intends to offer it and thereafter finds herself “dealing with
things way beyond my maturity level.”
That line will give you an idea of what has made this movie so
successful. Juno’s disarming candor together with a complete lack
of shame about her interesting condition is meant to reinforce our
sense of her emotional as well as sexual precocity. At the same
time she is also as endearingly vulnerable as any 16-year-old. Look
at the way she greets a high school classmate whom she unexpectedly
meets protesting outside the abortion clinic she visits before
thinking better of taking such a course to “deal with” her
pregnancy. Su Chin (Valerie Tian) is chanting: “All babies want to
get born!”
“You should try Adderall,” Juno tells her after offering a
friendly greeting and an inquiry after her health.
“No, thanks,” says Su Chin. “I’m off pills.”
“Wise move. I know this girl who had a huge crazy freakout
because she took too many behavioral meds at once. She took off all
her clothes and jumped into the fountain at Ridgedale Mall and she
was like, ‘Blaaaaah! I’m a kraken from the sea!’”
“I heard that was you,” says Su Chin.
Juno pauses and considers: “Well, it was nice seeing you, Su
Chin.”
It is Su Chin who supplies the information — that babies in the
womb have fingernails — which proves decisive in preventing Juno
from getting an abortion — a detail that serves as a reminder of
the weird mix of adult knowledge and youthful capriciousness,
standing in for absent innocence, that makes Juno believable.
Having thus established her, Miss Cody then contrasts her with
Mark, to whom Juno intends to entrust the fatherhood of her child
but who turns out to be much more immature than she is.
Like all strippers, I guess, Miss Cody’s gotta get a gimmick,
and the gimmick of Juno is this inversion. In principle,
it’s not a bad idea, but she appears not to recognize what a cliche
Mark is. The grown man who chooses to remain a perpetual adolescent
as a way of hiding from adult responsibilities is now so familiar a
figure that the last hit comedy to feature an accidental pregnancy,
Knocked Up, also had recourse to him. There, at least,
Seth Rogen’s slacker pot-head had to grow up fast, which made the
picture more satisfying as a bit of moralism but perhaps less
realistic. For Mark in Juno is an altogether more sinister
type: a prosperous and outwardly respectable suburban home-owner in
his thirties who makes a good living composing commercial jingles
but whose attachment to kid-culture is so unshakeable that he sees
no reason even in prospective fatherhood why he should ever have to
grow up.
Juno, like its heroine, takes this male immaturity for
granted — as part of the melancholy truth about the world and
about men that feminine maturity, inevitably in advance of the
masculine even where that exotic beast still exists, must simply
come to terms with. The only example of a mature man in the picture
is Juno’s father, “Mac” (J.K. Simmons), and even he pretty much has
to acknowledge himself beaten by the culture of immaturity when he
tells Juno that “the best thing you can do is find a person who
loves you for exactly what you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly,
pretty, handsome, what have you, the right person will still think
the sun shines out your ass. That’s the kind of person that’s worth
sticking with.”
In other words, don’t bother trying to seek out maturity and
discipline and good sense as the qualities you are looking for in a
prospective mate and the father of your children, even when you are
in a better position to have some. You’re not going to find them
anyway, so you might as well follow your heart. There is a kind of
sour feminism behind this outwardly upbeat conclusion, which
presumably comes of the hard-won wisdom about the impossibility of
changing people that we might expect from someone who told the
New York Times that “everything is prostitution.” Vanessa,
too, becomes much more likable on her own, when she is no longer
trying to play mom to Mark and baby him into accepting the
responsibilities of adulthood.
But the film’s celebration of the tight little circle of
independent women who have decided to let the men go off and play
with their toys without expecting anything more out of them strikes
me as a counsel of despair. It even cuts across Juno’s
chief virtue and the reason for its kudos — including, now, an
Oscar nomination as Best Picture — namely the witty dialogue that
speaks of a deep acquaintance with youthful aspirations to hipness.
A lot of the laughs are owing to the fact that this dialogue is put
in the mouth of a credible teenager, whose “maturity level” is thus
artificially pumped up. But that doesn’t stop it from being funny,
or for the film’s dark but humane view of the world not to be
entertaining.
