Juno **** (2007, Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner) – Classic Movie Review 541

A movie so funny and feel good you want to give it a big hug, this offbeat comedy just couldn’t be more charming, more amusing or sweeter. A little independent film that cost around $7million, Juno deservedly hit the big time at the box office in 2007, taking nearly $150million in America alone.

Ellen Page, who was 20 when she made it, is absolutely marvellous as the sassy, all-too-cynical 16-year-old Juno MacGuff, who decides to find the perfect parents to adopt her unborn baby after she finds she’s pregnant by a shy school friend, Paulie Bleeker (Superbad’s Michael Cera). Also ideally cast, Jennifer Garner (Elektra) and Jason Bateman (from TV’s Arrested Development) are spot on as the incredibly uptight, unbearably middle-class parents in question. She’s a strangely mumsy wife and he’s a weirdly laid-back musician.

Juno’s peculiar relationship with this odd couple provides the film’s backbone. There’s lots of fun to be had when their apparently idyllic marriage starts to crack as Juno gets to know them during her pregnancy, especially when the husband takes a shine to her!

In a hilarious film with great performances, Allison Janney and JK Simmons also stand out hysterically as Juno’s bemused parents, and so does Cera as the weird kid who, it turns out of course, truly loves Juno.

Some of the film’s success is down to Page’s haunting performance and to the lightness of touch of director Jason Reitman (son of Ivan Reitman, creator of Ghostbusters). But mostly it’s due to ex-stripper Diablo Cody’s fantastic screenplay, her first ever.

Reitman and Page were both Oscar nominated as Best Director and Best Actress, but Cody deservedly won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. It’s truly one of the wittiest, smartest, most endearing scripts all year. The film was also Oscar nominated as Best Motion Picture.

Ellen Page (26) came out as gay in February 2014. ‘I’m here today because I am gay,’ she told a Las Vegas conference of counsellors working with young people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ). She said she had suffered for years because she was afraid to come out. ‘I’m standing here today, with all of you, on the other side of all that pain,’ she said. The audience rose to its feet in applause.

(C) Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Film Review 541 derekwinnert.com