Juno (2007) is a warm blanket of a movie. The more I think about it, the more I like it. I remember whole scenes, lines of dialogue, songs from the soundtrack, and looks on the actors’ faces and they make me smile. The movie works on all cylinders, but the true power comes from the triumvirate of screenwriter Diablo Cody, director Jason Reitman, and star Ellen Page as the title character.

Juno tells the story of the 16-year old girl Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) who becomes pregnant after enlisting her friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) to try sex. Juno then sets up an adoption with Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) and Mark Loring (Jason Bateman), a yuppie couple who hasn’t been able to conceive. The rest of the story follows Juno’s pregnancy as she tries but is unable to maintain her distance from her situation. We witness some predictable scenes, such as Juno telling her father and step-mother (wonderfully played by J. K. Simmons and Allison Janney, respectively) that she’s pregnant, but these scenes don’t play in a predictable way. After Juno informs them, Mac, her father, says to Bren:

Mac: “Did you see that coming?”
Bren: “Yeah, but I was hoping she was expelled, or into hard drugs.”
Mac: “That was my first instinct too. Or a DWI. Anything but this.”

The plot is anything but straightforward and I’ll leave most of the surprises intact for you. Suffice it to say, we deal with real emotions of the characters, not with Hollywood cliches of characters in similar situations. Juno understands that she’s not ready to be a mother, so her connection with her child is not the guilt of giving it up, but the worry that a healthy, stable, and loving household could actually exist for her baby.

Cody’s screenplay is one of the best marriages of stylized dialogue and inventive plotting to come around in recent years. I expect that this film will have a cult following and people will quote it in everyday conversation like has happened with The Big Lebowski, The Princess Bride, or Napoleon Dynamite. The dialogue stands on a razor’s edge, flirting with being too sharp or too detached, but it never falls over the precipice—and it very well could go over the edge with a different director or different actors.

Reitman’s direction keeps things from spinning out of control, but he still lets the film breathe. He shows these quirky characters’ quirks the right way. One of the first sequences involves Juno walking around town, drinking from a gallon jug of Sunny Delight. I was worried that they were making her quirky for quirky’s sake, but we learn that this oddity of our heroine actually serves a purpose—she’s trying to get enough fluids in her to take her third pregnancy test that day. Reitman preserves the right beats in dialogue, which is great for a movie filled with quick-thinking and articulate characters. It’s also important to give space because he has Cera in his cast and Cera has proven in his short career to be able to express more with a single awkward silence than most actors could with a Shakespearean soliloquy.

All the actors bring full energy to their roles, but Ellen Page carries the film and not only because she is in every scene. Her acid tongue helps her maintain her detachment from others as well as helps her keep the upper hand in most conversations, with a few notable exceptions. Juno could be obnoxious in the wrong hands, but because Page is so engaging, we love her. Page has given one of the best performances of the year in a year of outstanding performances. I look forward to more from her in the future and here’s to hoping she makes interesting choices, because Juno is such an iconic character that she will likely always be remembered as Juno no matter what else she does (see: Audrey Tautou as Amelie).

Any film about teenage pregnancy in our time obviously opens a number of cans of worms, but to its credit, Juno doesn’t fall into debates and become a message movie. Nor does it try to skirt around those issues. It lets the characters address the issues in ways consistent with their personalities. I’ll address more about this aesthetic aspect of the film in another post. As of now, I’ll leave it at saying Juno is probably the best comedy of 2007 (depending on how one classifies Ratatouille) and will likely and deservedly take home an Oscar for best original screenplay. Here’s to hoping Page can pick up best actress as well.