Baby On Board

Page, who admits that she’s “obsessive” about music (lately, she’s been savoring Sigur Ros and New Young Pony Club) inadvertently helped score the film by introducing Reitman to The Moldy Peaches after he asked her what music she thought Juno would jam to; Reitman contacted Peaches singer Kimya Dawson, who sent him the songs that eventually ended up soundtracking the bulk of the film. Music looms large in Juno, from Juno and Bleecker’s earnest guitar duets to Mark’s secret stash of guitars, records, comics and rock memorabilia. Mark’s music room, deliberately quarantined from the rest of the Loring house, is his last vestige of hope, a holding pen for his lingering (and embarrassingly sympathetic) rock-star dreams— aspirations that, in Mark’s mind, are bound to be destroyed by fatherhood.

“He wants to still be a musician and wear his groovy T-shirts and all that crap,” Bateman says. “That’s pretty relatable. That’s all of us. All of my friends are either like that or have been like that, myself included. I’m certainly not perfect, and I haven’t completely grown up entirely, and all of my arrested development, if you will, I still remember it all— I pulled on all that stuff. It’s not too far from me.”

“[Among other things], the film is about is a bunch of people growing up. And Mark is the one guy that doesn’t. The way it was written— hopefully the way it was played—you don’t have a lot of faith in this guy. He’s the one person who doesn’t take a step forward. He actually goes backwards,” Bateman admits. “But that’s kind of fun to play, too. I like playing people who don’t really have it all together, but [who] like to convince other people that they do. Often, it’s a quick way to comedy, and it’s also a pretty quick route to drama. It makes people human.”

Both Bateman’s performance and Cody’s script skewer the extended adolescence that’s so common for men and women coming of age in the 21st century, when self-actualization and non-conformity are highly prized ideals. At 16, Juno accepts that she has to grow up and assume responsibility; Mark, meanwhile, refuses to consider the implications of his marriage, his age or his choices, opting instead to remain paused. It’s a brand new archetype: Rather than the briefcase-toting, provide-for-the family adult male of the mid-to-late 20th century, Cody and Bateman present the T-shirt-wearing, Bowie-listening, kid-fearing, work-from-home husband of the new millennium. It’s hard to imagine any other character so accurately capturing the new look of American adulthood.

Cody is charmingly nonchalant about her writing and her characters, but Juno’s cast and crew are unrelentingly effusive about her work: All consistently point back to Cody’s script as the cornerstone of the film’s charm.

“It’s not only her first screenplay, but she wrote it in two months!” Reitman exclaims. “She sat down and said ‘I’m gonna write a screenplay,’ and then in two months she had Juno. It’s disgusting. I thought [the script] was completely original. I read a lot, and I also write my own work, and I find that most of the screenplays I read are fairly identical—they all make the same jokes. When I read Juno, Diablo had just taken a really original point of view on teenage pregnancy. Every time there was a decision to be made, every time there was a line of dialogue to be written, she was inventive.”

“A lot of it was naivete", because I wasn’t pompous enough to sit down and think I was going to write this really stylized, cool dialogue,” counters Cody. “It was my first screenplay—I just wanted to tell a coherent story. But I think that because of my background writing prose, writing nonfiction—oh my God, I sound so pretentious,” Cody snorts, interrupting herself. “But you know what I mean. Because of my background writing in other forms, I was used to the words on the page being all I had to work with, so I tried to make it as flashy and appealing and pyrotechnic as I could, not realizing that the camera was going to come in and add so much more. So I think it came off as more stylized than, perhaps, I anticipated. My favorite films are thematically so different from Juno,” Cody continues. “I love horror movies and big, broad comedies. My favorite movie is probably Rosemary’s Baby. I don’t know if I see any kinship there,” she laughs. “I’ve never been super-well-versed in the world of cinema, but I’m learning now.”

Juno features a cabal of young talent—from the 29-year-old Cody and the 30-year old Reitman to its trio of teenage stars—and their work here makes it easy to be hopeful for the future of Hollywood filmmaking.