Making Teenage Pregnancy Fun
It doesn’t take long for director Jason Reitman’s Juno to exhibit serious signs of incurable indie-itis. The movie displays several of those “unique” touches that run rampant in small films that try too hard to be unconventional. Within its first 15 minutes, the title character contemplates committing suicide by hanging herself with licorice rope.
Then there’s Juno’s snappy dialogue, which, for the most part, barely resembles actual speech—especially in the case of Juno (Ellen Page), a precocious teen who has just discovered that she’s pregnant. An early exchange between Juno and a convenience store clerk played by The Office’s Rainn Wilson, as seen in the film’s trailer, is particularly eye-roll inducing. “That is one doodle that can’t be undid, home skillet,” he tells her. Home skillet? What does that even mean?
But as Juno progresses, it grows less mannered and more engrossing. Although the plot investigates potentially dark issues like teenage pregnancy and marital dissatisfaction, Juno maintains a lighthearted tone that strikes a balance between humor and sincerity. Much of the credit should go to Diablo Cody, the stripper-turned-screenwriter who never wanted to write a screenplay until a Hollywood executive read her blog and e-mailed her, saying she should consider film writing.
“I thought, ‘Hey, this guy means business. All right, I’ll try writing a movie,’” Cody says in a roundtable interview that also includes Page and Reitman. “Because he kept dangling this sort of carrot in front of me, like, ‘If you write a movie, you won’t have to go back to work.’ And I hate working, so I was like, ‘All right, I’ll give it a try.’ So I wrote Juno.”
Of course, it wasn’t always easy to make a movie look and feel genuine when characters are saying things like, “I am for shizzle up the spout.”
“The tricky thing with Diablo’s dialogue is that it’s so clever that it almost draws attention to itself by its own nature,” Reitman says, acknowledging some of the challenges of the stylized script. “The trick is doing the exact opposite—it’s, how do you make this film, which could so easily feel like we’re winking at the camera the whole time, and make it actually feel very authentic and real?”
The film’s direction played a large part in creating an engaging tone.
“All I wanted to do was capture the feeling I felt when I first read her screenplay,” Reitman says. “Stanley Kubrick said the trick is always remembering that feeling you had when you first read something, and that was it with this screenplay—there were all these wonderful surprises.”
Cody also found a surprise in Page’s virtuosic performance as Juno, who broke through the potentially deadly dialogue and is already garnering Oscar buzz. “You know, she’s so awesome, and she has the most… I can’t even imagine what it must be like to inhabit such a relaxed body. I’m so tense,” she says. “Certain lines that I had always imagined as being very distinct, she’ll kind of run them together sometimes, and it works so well. It actually sounds like human beings talking, not like a nerd sitting at her computer. And I think the dialogue that I wrote had potential to be too snappy. If someone had given it like a sitcom delivery, I think it could have been really gross. And Ellen just nailed it.”
Despite Juno’s stylized dialogue and a tendency to overindulge in whimsy—Juno has a phone shaped like a hamburger as well as a kid sister named Liberty Bell—Reitman and Cody’s aggressively hip film is ultimately successful. On paper, Juno seems like a combination of Knocked Up and Superbad. On screen, though, the film is nothing like those Judd Apatow hits—it’s funny and touching, and most definitely has its own voice.
Though that distinctive voice may be difficult to overcome, Page notes that other depictions of teenagers are no more realistic. “I think I fell in love because I felt like it [the script] was devoid of stereotype,” she says. “I’m just excited that that’ll be out in the world, because I’m so sick and tired of there just being a void of young, genuine females,” Page says. “Something that’s different from trying to bang the guy before prom, or girls being vindictive bitches to each other. And it becomes so intoxicating and frustrating. Or at the end of the film, the weird girl gets beautiful. I can’t even tell you how mad that makes me. It makes me want to stab myself with a fork in the eye.”