Baby On Board

Diablo Cody, Jason Reitman and the birth of Juno

Writer: Amanda Petrusich, photo by Doane Gregory
Features, Issue 38, Published online on 28 Nov 2007 Page 1 of 2 Next >

“I never thought I would direct a high-school movie. I gave instructions to my agent early on: Don’t send me any high-school comedies,” sighs Jason Reitman. “A couple pages into Juno it was like, ‘Oh this is actually pretty good,’ which is always a surprise when you’re reading a screenplay. [Then] 10 or 20 pages in I was like, ‘Wow, this is really good, I may actually want to make this.’ And by the end of the screenplay I felt like, ‘If I don’t get the opportunity to make this, I might as well kill myself.’”

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Juno follows the travails of its title character, a precocious Minnesota teen (Ellen Page) who engages in premarital sex with her track-and-field-compelled pal, Paulie Bleecker (Arrested Development’s Michael Cera, showing off endless white limbs in polyester short-shorts and tank tops); their coupling isn’t particularly dramatic or overwrought, and would remain largely inconsequential were Juno not to end up pregnant. After visiting an abortion clinic and consulting with her acerbic cohort Leah (Olivia Thirlby), Juno begins scouring the PennySaverfor potential adoptive parents, ultimately selecting Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner), a sweet-faced suburban couple with big grins, shiny hairdos and a huge, impeccably decorated subdivision home. Seasons change, Juno swells and, aided by her blue-collar father and stepmother (J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney), she approaches her ninth month, only to find Mark beginning to sweat—and her carefully cultivated scenario about to crumble.

In this follow-up to his 2005 full-length directorial debut Thank You For Smoking, Reitman harnesses both camera and script to make a movie that’s apolitical without being irresponsible, quirky without being unsubstantial, and sweet without getting too sentimental: Juno should flatten any remaining doubts that Reitman’s success is in any way attributable to the influence of his father, famed producer/director Ivan Reitman (whose directing credits include American comedy classics Meatballs, Twins, Kindergarten Cop and Ghostbusters). The film is one of the sharpest teen comedies to emerge from Hollywood in years.

“If somebody just told you one sentence about [this film], you’d say ‘Yeah, well, I liked that the first time I saw it, when it was an after-school special 20 years ago,’” shrugs Jason Bateman, whose portrayal of Mark—a guy stuck in a life he doesn’t feel prepared for—is both hilarious and devastating. “But the dialogue is so fun to listen to, and Jason’s technique as a director could make anything worth watching,” Bateman continues. “If you’re given good material, all you have to do is not screw it up. It’s easy to be good in something like this, something that’s great before you even get on board.”

Plenty of films have mined accidental pregnancy for guffaws (see Knocked Up, Saved!, at least 5 movies starring Steve Martin). But first-time screenwriter Diablo Cody—best known for her columns in the Minneapolis alt-weekly City Pages, and for her 2005 memoir Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper—focuses instead on the singular (and diverse) rhythms of teenagers, denying broad high-school archetypes and portraying the film’s 16-year-old heroine as witty, self-assured and disarmingly intelligent. Juno isn’t only a remarkable teenager; she’s a fully realized, compelling human being, trying her best to navigate a world that’s both intensely unfamiliar and completely mundane: All the classic, stupid indicators of teenage femininity—fretting over outfits and makeup, strutting, whispering bitchy comments, scrawling in precious pink diaries—are gone, replaced by burger phones, acoustic guitars, red hooded sweatshirts, licorice ropes, Stooges records, old jeans and enormous blue Slurpees. Filmic teenagers of yore—all angst and superficiality—never allowed for the notion that a teenage girl might actually be likeable, let alone inspirational.

“She’s a little badass!” Cody laughs, speaking on the phone from her new home in Los Angeles, where she’s currently working as a writer and producer for a Steven Spielberg-conceived television series (The United States of Tara, starring Toni Collette, begins shooting next year). “I feel that teenage girls have been treated unfairly in film. Certainly my experience as a teenage girl was so different from what I see depicted. I knew so many girls who were adventurous, interesting, confident, cynical, curious— all these interesting qualities that you don’t really see in representations of teenage girls in popular culture,” Cody continues. “Especially now. I came of age in the ’90s, when the whole riot grrl thing was happening, and my friends and I were running around in flannel shirts and starting bands and writing poetry. That was our zeitgeist. Now it’s completely different, and so image-conscious.”

Twenty-year-old Halifax native Ellen Page (Hard Candy, X-Men: The Last Stand) embodies Juno with mesmeric ease— in an early scene, she fashions herself a noose out of red rope licorice, stringing herself up from a tree before chomping herself loose. For another actor, the motion may have seemed morose or heavy-handed; with Page, it’s fleeting, charming and perfectly emblematic of adolescence. “What I adored about Juno was that she seemed a lot more genuine and a lot more honest than teenage girls are typically written,” Page explains. “She doesn’t feel contrived. It’s a drag, it’s a friggin’ drag that this girl is considered so out there [as a character] when, really, me and a lot of my friends—we were like Juno in high school,” Page says. “We listened to the music that she listens to; we wore sweater vests. It just doesn’t get reflected in popular media, which is too bad. But now it feels great to actually be that 16-year-old lead in a film, and wearing a sweater vest.”

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Baby On Board

Diablo Cody, Jason Reitman and the birth of Juno

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