Juno: Less Knocked Up, More Ghost World.

Thursday, cigarette #2
Outside the theatre after watching Juno, 10:35pm

Juno was written by someone called Diablo Cody, and it shows. If I thought I could get a laugh from "This is one doodle that can't be undid, home-skillet," I would probably write under a goofy-awful name, too. The whole movie tastes like a Wes Anderson script that's been left at the back of the fridge for a year, except for Michael Cera, who has the "cool enough to mumble but smart enough to enunciate" diction down pretty well down.

As The Guy Who Got Our Protagonist Pregnant In the First Place, Cera is the movie's one edge over Knocked Up. Apatow's lesson: Men are unhelpful to the women they knock up, because men are, at the end of the day, pretty useless (and don't like to shop, and rarely ask for directions when lost, and what's the deal with airline food?).

Juno has a little more to say for the man in question. Just when things start to look bad for Juno and we start wondering why Cera doesn't just put on his shining armor already, we are reminded that it's because Juno dumped him and he's recovering from a heartbreak that he only halfway feels entitled to — after all, it's not like he's pregnant. But I would have preferred that Reitman had shaved a couple of dimension off of Cera's character and handed them out to the rest of the cast. They probably would have appreciated the chance to play more than one.

Ross Douthat has earned his credentials as a film geek, but his review makes Juno sound a lot more subtle than it was. "Careful viewers will note that while Juno sits in the clinic, filling out paperwork, the camera zooms in on the fingernails of the other people in the waiting room." No, careful viewers will note that the color of Barbara Bel Geddes's sweater in Vertigo always reflects the mood of the scene. Everybody and their kid sister noticed the fingernails.

And it isn't really that Juno "complicates rather than over-simplifies" the "thorny issues" of the culture war, because it hardly takes them on. Juno didn't get an abortion, but she could have. In much the same way, she drinks Sunny D, but could have picked Tropicana. I wouldn't have wanted the movie to handle the abortion question with too much emotional heft, but I was a little off-put that it wasn't handled with any. There's something unsatisfying about a character whose wise-cracking cynicism is unfazed by, y'know, the miracle of life, but who gets emotionally vulnerable about the revelation that Jason Bateman's comics-reading thirty-year-old is about as mature as you'd expect him to be. Either breaking through her cynicism was too hard or it wasn't hard enough, but either way, it's a strange way to order your priorities.