"I Can't Wait to Meet You" -- Part One of Two

Editor's note. I anticipate a lot of response. Please send your comments to daveandrusko@hotmail.com.

"NEW YORK -- The teenage brain, Laurence Steinberg says, is like a car with a good accelerator but a weak brake. With powerful impulses under poor control, the likely result is a crash.'"

From an Associated Press story, summarizing research "which indicates the juvenile brain is still maturing in the teen years and reasoning and judgment are developing well into the early to mid 20s."

Any parent reading this will smile and nod in recognition. Especially the comparison between the ginned-up accelerator and the wildly overmatched brake.

As it happens a friend of mine sent this story to me just before my wife and I [tardy as always] went to see the film, Juno. While I may be behind in my movie-going habits, the film's subject matter--teen pregnancy--is timeless.

There is already Oscar talk for the performance of Ellen Page as 16-year-old Juno MacDuff. But Page is only one star in a movie that offers a constellation of terrific performances.

These include Michael Cera as her kind-of boyfriend Paulie, Olivia Thirlby as her supportive best friend, J.K. Simmons as her dad, Allison Janney as her stepmother, and Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman as the yuppy couple Juno picks out of a freebie Pennysaver to be her baby's adoptive parents.

Any movie about teen pregnancy that drives the ever-dour Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman to glumly offer cautionary tales has to have something going for it. (To be fair, Goodman, who is so steeped in pro-abortion rhetoric that she inhales and exhales pro-abortion propaganda, was already primed to be angry. A raft of recent films refuses to offer abortion as a "solution.")

Many of our readers either have seen the film or know the premise. For reasons of her own--but mostly boredom, resentment/cynicism, and her outsider status in a small Minnesota town--Juno semi-seduces Paulie, who is obviously smitten with the droll, acerbic Juno.

Director Jason Reitman's opening scene, where Juno discovers she is pregnant, sets the tone for the film. As David Denby observes, " [H]er initial reaction to her overwhelming new situation is to treat it with the same flip, pop-cult school-locker sarcasm that she uses for everything else."

Unsurprisingly, Juno's first thought is to "nip this in the bud before it gets any worse." In a way that comes across as perfectly natural (these are kids, after all), neither Paulie nor her best friend Leah says anything to dissuade her from having an abortion.

But on the way into "Women Now," Juno encounters a lone sidewalk counselor--a girl from her own school played by Valerie Tian. (Her brilliant performance has been ignored by critics.) Tian's sincere but ineffectual efforts--rhetorically she unloads everything she can think of as Juno approaches the abortion clinic--are for naught….until she mentions the baby has fingernails.

Why that would capture a teenager's imagination is beyond me--but that's part of the point. This image is planted in Juno's brain. She "sees" and "hears" the sound of fingernails everywhere and the next thing you know, she's left "Women Now."

Juno is wise enough to understand something she emphasizes explicitly later: being a 16-year-old mom is "something way beyond my maturity level." So she talks with Leah about finding a couple to adopt "it." Leah tells her about the Pennysaver which, in addition to ads for rebuilt carburetors, also includes text and photos of couples looking to adopt.

Among the best features of the film is that Juno's parents come across as actual human beings-- full of flaws and shortcomings, but filled with love for their daughter.

Without using the word "abortion," Janney inquires if Juno has something else in mind besides finding adoptive parents. The moment Juno says no, Janney jumps into hyper-overdrive, making sure her stepdaughter takes care of herself--and the baby.

Her dad expresses disappointment in his daughter, which prompts the first ever-so-slight crack in Juno's wisecracking veneer. But he, too, steps up to the plate.

What a lesson: nobody initially is supportive of Juno's decision not to abort. Without that one lonely voice that turned that "bud" into an actual human being, the baby would have died. As is so often the case (and which drives the Ellen Goodmans of this world nuts), once past the initial shock, everyone pitches in.

The final point I'd like to mention is a scene that takes place in the mall when Juno and Leah run into Jennifer Garner, whose desperation to be a mother is all-consuming. It is so poignant it almost takes your breath away.

The Los Angeles Times movie reviewer offers this keenly insightful description:

"Meanwhile, the more [Juno] gets to know Vanessa, the more she understands what her choice means. In one of the movie's most beautiful scenes -- Garner is touchingly awkward in it -- Juno encourages Vanessa to talk to the baby in her belly, and Vanessa delivers what is perhaps the movie's least clever, most heartbreaking line, a shy 'I can't wait to meet you' so intimate you forget she's talking to the baby through another person, at a mall. Funny as 'Juno' is, it's scenes like these that ultimately make it so satisfying. Deceptively superficial at the outset, the movie deepens into something poignant and unexpected."

I hope no one is off-put by the impossibly-witty dialogue, or sees the film as treating a very, very serious topic flippantly. I would encourage anyone to look beyond the superficial, to see whether Juno isn't a textured, very human portrait of a teenage pregnancy and how something that starts out a "mistake" is redeemed by courage and love.

If you have any questions or comments, please send them to daveandrusko@hotmail.com.

Part Two