Demob Happy

Juno - Jason Reitman

For a long time I resisted watching Jason Reitman’s ‘Juno’. On paper it was the kind of film I avoided like a virus, yet reviewers kept telling me to see it. Even my most trusted blog buddy William Rycroft gave it the thumbs up, albeit with the helpful disclaimer “many will find the film to be relentlessly quirky” and that “elements of the film have a whiff of Wes Anderson” - two qualities I can’t say made me exactly impatient to see ‘Juno’, and both of which proved correct. Nonetheless I found myself, against my better judgement, selecting Juno from my local DVD vending machine (do these only exist in France?), having scrolled aimlessly through many titles, most of which translated, sometimes amusingly, into French: Le Secret de Brokeback Mountain, for example, but more on that here.

‘Juno’ instantly reminded me of ‘Little Miss Sunshine‘, another quirky film which enjoys an equally over-generous status (and that I’m also proud to dislike). I think my problem with both films is that they are sentimental and excessively cute but have somehow claimed indie credibility by dint of their mildly offbeat themes. While ‘Juno’ didn’t have me cringing as much as ‘Miss Sunshine’, to me the much-praised dialogue rang self-consciously arch: great on paper but painfully contrived on screen. While admirably put together and well-acted, Juno’s barbed ripostes sound transparently like the product of over-caffeinated, Starbucks-bothering thirty-something scriptwriters who want to show off their on-trend music taste: Iggy Pop, Sonic Youth and The Carpenters all get mentions. So cool! Except for the fact that the cute girl-boy indie soundtrack is like tweeness distilled to its raw essence. The Amazon DVD review concedes that the dialogue seems “forced at first, but soon creates a richly textured world”, which is frankly hyperbolic nonsense (but, yes, we’re all guilty of that sometimes). I am also serially immune to the type of dialogues punctuated by US lexical tics such as “like, totally!“, particularly when they are not employed to satirise the characters. The empathy simply drains out of my body faster than Juno’s breaking waters, that other movie and TV pregnancy cliché repeated in the film.

I feel that ultimately, for all the plaudits for Juno’s original handling of subject matter, the film still idealises teenage pregnancy. The character Juno herself is impossibly precocious and sharply witty to begin with, and most of her wisdom is learnt independently, and not from the often fallible, occasionally hypocritical adult world. For me this is as saccharine and simplistic as the average teen movie, just better marketed: by staying on the right side of the liberal-redneck divide, and throwing in some indie-approved cultural references, you’ll push all the right buttons at Sundance and “hey presto!”, Indie Smash Hit^TM.

Ah, that’s better! It’s been a while since I’ve really enjoyed slagging off a film. It seems that more often than not viewers disagree with me on this - except for this one and that one, for example - but ‘Juno’ really rubbed me up the wrong way.