well, now that the 2007 movie season is officially over, I have two more cents to add. A few posts ago, I outlined my take on some of the better (read: bloodier) films of the year. conspicuously absent from that list was one of everyone's favorite pics, a movie I found to be bland beyond description.
Now, i'm certainly not saying that there is no room for lighter fare. I enjoy a good laugh. I know movies should present a fairy tale world every once in a while. And i definitely do not begrudge Diablo Cody her Oscar. She is a talented filmmaker in an industry that too often eschews female voices, and I very much look forward to her later work.
But Juno. What was Juno? Was it just a feminized version of the funnier Knocked up? Was it a Lost in Translation for Ameicans for whom being bored hanging out with movie stars in tokyo is not an overriding concern? Or was it, as many critics have wondered, a thinly veiled pro-life propaganda vehicle?
I think, more so than anything, Juno was the story of impossibility, about a girl who navigates her world in about the same way that a paper boat would navigate the Colorado, laughing and singing (a sad tune, but a song nonetheless) her way towards, well, I'm not sure what. In fact, the problem with Juno--a problem rooted in the screenplay, in the production, in the marketing--was the inability of any of the characters to make a single decision.
By my count, there were exactly two decisions made by all the characters in Juno. The first was fore-ordained: Juno's decision to keep the seamonkey growing inside her because, well, it had fingernails...and because how could she get herself into more shenanigans if she did otherwise? the second decision was when Jason Bateman's character backed out of his life, abandoned his wife and his unborn, surrogate child, and made off for the city. Now there's a movie! But, no, we go back to Juno and the Moldy Peaches.
Which is to say, I just didn't get it. Ebert, in calling Juno the best of 2007 , had this to say: "Strange, how during Juno's hip dialogue and cocky bravado, we begin to understand the young woman inside, and we want to hug her." But i guess my problem was exactly that: that I didn't understand Juno. I didn't understand where she got her strength from, I didn't understand why she found her situation funny and not painful, I didn't understand why she wasn't angry, how she toyed with Bleeker or why he let her get away with it. I thought all the emotions were sophmoric, not hidden behind the dialogue, but substituted out for it. There was no ticking clock, no wires that needed to be cut. Without genuine alternatives, how can we sympathize with the characters as they live their lives--their lives, and not others? how can we regard what they say as anything more than fortune cookie wisdom when they don't have a conflict from which to extricate themselves, or internal contradictions that need to be negotiated? Frankly, I was bored.
Now, Juno is certainly not another Napolean Dynomite, a movie with an indie spirit that caught on but was nonetheless genuinely bad. Indeed, fine, I'll say Juno was good, great even. But banal, indifferent, and, in some ways, lazy. I'd recommend Juno. I'll probably rent it on DVD. But the years best? Ebert, I think that stroke went to your head.
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