Baby On Board

“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.”

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.