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Hating JunoHow the backlash started.

By Dana Stevens
Posted Friday, Feb. 8, 2008, at 1:10 PM ET
Juno. Click image to expand.

Now that Juno has been nominated in four major Oscar categories (best picture, best actress, best original screenplay, and best director) and become the highest-grossing of the five best picture nominees (last week, it passed the $100 million mark; the next in line, No Country for Old Men, is at just above $55 million), it's become a movie that one must take a position on. When Juno came out, I saw it as a flawed but fun indie, a film that, despite the screenplay's overreliance on grating banter, somehow snuck up on you by the end and made you like it. Not everyone needed that much persuasion. The movie made more than 175 top 10 lists and was declared the best movie of the year by the likes of Roger Ebert and Andrew Sarris. Some critics' praise sounded as if they were gazing upon the Pantheon: "A confluence of perfection in every aspect," wept the San Francisco Chronicle. A film "almost too unique for description," marveled Film Journal International.

But Juno is also unique in its ability to get on people's nerves, especially now that its Oscar momentum is building. Vanity Fair's Oscar blogger, S.T. VanAirsdale, concedes that he likes the movie just fine but is put off by its nomination alongside heavy-hitters like There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men: "Frankly, I don't want to see Juno within a thousand feet of the Kodak Theater. I want her and her twee champions stopped at the metal detector. I want her turned away for being underdressed." Jim DeRogatis, music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, gives a blunter assessment in a review of the soundtrack that quickly spirals into an anti-Juno screed: "As an unapologetically old-school feminist, the father of a soon-to-be-teenage daughter, a reporter who regularly talks to actual teens as part of his beat and a plain old moviegoer, I hated, hated, hated this movie."

Then came the anti-backlash backlash. The day the nominations came out, Simpsons writer Tim Long piped up meekly, "Is it so wrong to have liked Juno a little?" Alone among the movies of 2007, Juno is a movie you adore or revile, attack or defend, and maybe change your mind about—not just after a second viewing, but halfway through the first.

Even the most convinced Juno lovers tend to agree that the movie's first quarter is excruciatingly arch. Scanning the critical response to Juno, I was struck by the near-universality of this observation: Though initially off-putting, the movie eventually worms its way into the viewer's heart. Many critics, including me, pointed to the 20-minute mark as the point when irritation gave way to affection.

On a second viewing, I could clock more precisely the movie's trajectory from coy to bearable to genuinely moving. The nadir of cuteness is the much-reviled opening, in which Ellen Page's pregnant teenage heroine trades stiff quips with a convenience-store clerk (Rainn Wilson): "Your eggo is preggo"; "Silencio, old man!"; "This is one diddle that can't be un-did, homeskillet." Soon after comes the too-cute early scene in which Juno breaks the news to her best friend, Lea (Olivia Thirlby), on her hamburger-shaped phone, provoking such interjections as "Honest to blog?" and "Phuket, Thailand!"

Juno may not have had me at hello, but it managed to win me over by the time Juno's carapace of cleverness finally shows its first chink, as she admits to her disappointed father (J.K. Simmons), "I really don't know what kind of girl I am." Maybe it was Ellen Page's luminous face and brazen self-confidence, or the unexpected transformation of Jennifer Garner's character—beautifully played by Garner and, yes, beautifully written by Diablo Cody. Michael Cera's exquisite comic timing makes even his underwritten character come alive. And I know I'm supposed to sneer at the precious indie-rock soundtrack, but some of those songs are really catchy. I tried to approach a second viewing in the mood of critical dyspepsia capable of inspiring one-liners like "[Juno] is a vintage lunch box purse with nothing in it." But I have a hard time despising this sweet little movie, even if much of the acclaim being heaped upon it (best director? best picture?) feels like overkill.

At this point, it's difficult to separate Juno hatred itself from a more general ennui inspired by the film's marketing campaign. There's the maddening ubiquity of the movie's pseudonymous author (say it with me now: stripper turned blogger turned Oscar-nominated screenwriter!). Cody is now writing the back-page column for Entertainment Weekly (I'll leave the question of whether her writing there is groundbreakingly sassy or painfully self-indulgent to be battled out in the feature's bloodthirsty comments section). Then there's the faux-humble Oscar push that's trying to position Juno as the "little movie that could," even as Fox throws the full weight of its marketing dollars behind it. Juno's unexpected groundswell among young viewers has even been compared, with a straight face, to Obamamania: "Look at the political world," says Russell Smith, one of the film's producers, in this week's Entertainment Weekly cover story. "If you say the word 'change,' everybody gets up and applauds. That's where we are: We're dying for something different." Good luck hitching your wagon to that star, Russell. But if anything, the sharply split popular opinion on Juno, and the depth of loathing it's capable of inspiring, seems more reminiscent of Hillary Clinton. Both ladies are heading into a hotly contested election; it remains to be seen whether their champions or their haters will win the day.

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Dana Stevens is Slate's movie critic.
Photograph of Ellen Page in Juno on article page and on Slate's home page by Doane Gregory ©2007 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved.
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Remarks from the Fray:

I liked it well enough to watch it a second time, and then I really appreciated it. […] Juno's annoying lines in the beginning are signs of the protective ironic-teen carapace of the character -- which falls away as she faces life. She starts out treating everything with smart-aleck jokes, then she changes. Watch the actor's face register these changes.

It's not a sign of a flawed movie that Juno starts out being annoying. The movie didn't started out bad and get better 20 minutes in. Rather, the character progressively grew. You might as well say that Jane Austen's "Emma" starts out bad (because the character is annoying) but the book gets better. It's called character development.

--Eric Fry

(To reply, click here.)

Well, let's see some of the positions the movie takes:

1. Irony and snark won't pull you through; commitment and love will.

2. A real strong dad who finds satisfaction in his wife and children is better to have around than a hip, sexy guy who still dreams of the vie boheme and resents his bougie wife.

3. At 17, "You're the coolest person I know" is a compliment. At 37, "Aren't you the cool one" is a well deserved expression of contempt.

4. Whatever you do about it, pregnancy has consequences.

5. After all the cards have been shuffled, we still wind up with a deserted single mom who loves her baby.

Underneath the glib dialog, hip name checks and calm acceptance that teenagers actually have sex lives, Juno is a profoundly conservative celebration of traditional family values and an attack on bohemian self indulgence. I suspect that there are a lot of people who find themselves insulted by it.

--jack_cerf

(To reply, click here.)

It is my opinion that Juno is getting backlash because it is unlike other films. People aren't murdered or overly deceived. The movie is about a simple problem for a simple family. It makes a plain, unnoticed girl very noticeable. And she does a heroic thing without making apologies. In a world where parents routinely cover over their children's mistakes with money, Juno shows an alternative--responsibility. The movie is perfect from the cast and setting right down to the fabulous mushroom salt and pepper shakers. Perhaps Hollywood should learn that plenty of people like movies about regular people living their lives in extraordinarily regular ways--without mass murder and creepy soundtracks.

--mcnuisance

(To reply, click here.)

What I found most jarring about "Juno" when I saw it was that taken at face value, the interactions portrayed in it make no sense. The girl is impossibly self-assured, clinically detached and jaded. She treats the adults around her as equals, if not as inferiors, and the adults, likewise, respond to her as they would a poised, assertive adult--which is what she seems to be, in all respects other than her actual age. Moreover, these adults scarcely exist apart from her--their lives seem to revolve around her, as if populating her life were their only purpose. This solipsistic unrealism reminded me a lot of the film,Peggy Sue Got Married, in which a middle-aged woman suddenly wakes up to find herself back in high school, taking advantage of her knowledge and experience to recognize and correct her youthful mistakes in dealing with various people.

In the latter film, though, the title character eventually reconciles herself to the life she embarked on as a naive youth. Juno hints at a much darker reality: the girl's jaded detachment, as well as several plot elements I'll refrain from revealing, suggested to me a sexually traumatized twenty-something fantasizing about re-experiencing her vulnerable teen years with the protection afforded by her adult knowledge.

In fact, it was only after seeing the film--and having this reaction--that I learned about screenwriter Diablo Cody and her past as a stripper and peep-show performer. Obviously I don't know what drove her into the sex industry, but I'd guess it's probably the same thing that inspired this fantasy screenplay.

--Dan Simon

(To reply, click here.)

Juno is good because it has insanely good actors who understand comedy...Ellen Page is the personification of someone who has "it," Michael Cera and Jason Batemen are comic masterminds just by sitting there, and JK Simmons and Allison Janey are A-list character actors. Having actors that good tends to make people think that everything else is really good when it's not. Juno was not directed particularly well; the tedious shots of cookie cutter homes is just one of Jason Reitman's unoriginal ways of making a statement about suburbia. Reitman also has a bad habit of stepping on his own jokes. The geek-chic music selection was far too precious. And again, the script...spending the first half-hour not laughing with those actors is not very impressive. The irony is that everyone is focused on Diablo Cody's dialogue and her strongest skill is character and structure. Her dialogue is always at some level of bad. But hey, first script...

Bottom line, two gargantuan American films were made this year ("No Country" and "Blood"), they're going to take everything on the planet, and a little movie with a first-time writer and second-time director got notice, made people happy, and threw some glow on lots of people involved. So what's the problem again, haters?

--mcgeorge

(To reply, click here.)

(2/11)

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