A surprising little movie

It’s called “Juno.” I saw the preview recently and it looked like a lot of other cultural storylines, but somehow sweeter. It quickly became evident why the difference, as the preview unfolded. “Juno” has a de facto pro-life message. In fact, that’s the whole idea behind the film.

And it’s not such a little movie, after all.

Barb Nicolosi put out this review the other day. She’s a tough critic, and she raved about “Juno”.

Juno is first and foremost a humane film. It’s wonderfully humane. Not sure how to expand on that. You have to see it to know what I mean. But without being a political message movie, Juno is also pro-life, in the way that just about every Gen-X movie about pregnancy is pro-life, and more so. (I would say Juno is a cultural message movie without being a political one. Certainly, that will be an inscrutable nuance in contemporary Christendom in which almost everything is politics. What I think is interesting is that Gen Xers and Millenials are pro-life without necessarily being Culture of Life. They don’t put together all the pieces in the puzzle….not yet anyway.) The movie is also anti-divorce in the way that just about every Gen-X movie about family is anti-divorce. And people with faith are here too, in a decent and gritty way that shows mere secularism to be selfish and shallow.

There is wonderful film making in this movie. All the elements come together to set and maintain the tone. It knows what it’s about, and it makes you care. But the film makers absolutely know that the principle element in a movie is character. And Juno has some of the best I’ve seen in the movies in recent memory. I really loved these people. I wanted them to be real.

Read her whole review. I know Barb. It’s really hard to get this kind of review out of Barb. But “Juno” earned it. In every way, this movie is startling.

The Wall Street Journal put its review of “Juno” on the front page of the ‘Personal Journal’ section today. Joe Morgenstern called it charming.

The first thing you should know about “Juno” is that it’s wonderful.

Attention grabbing opener. 

The second thing is that there’s a good reason for the heroine’s frequent use of highfalutin (plus some deliciously lowfalutin) language. Juno MacGuff, a suddenly and unintentionally pregnant high-school student played by the phenomenal Ellen Page, fires off words and sentences as if they were smart missiles in order to defend herself from her own feelings, not to mention the world around her.

She doesn’t seem to be acting. She seems to be who she is, disarmingly, in every scene. Ready with an answer, though inside, not as ready as she thinks.

She can’t face an abortion, she knows she’s not ready to be a mother, and the father-to-be, a winsome classmate, is far less mature than she. That’s why the solution she settles on seems, at first, heaven-sent — find a perfect childless couple and give them her baby when it’s born (though the feelingful word “baby” doesn’t figure in her otherwise vast vocabulary; she prefers “it” or “the kid”). But then the question becomes one of parenthood — who’s truly fit for the task and who isn’t — and the movie becomes, for almost all concerned, a surprising, stirring chronicle of growth.

The Roe generation that knows they survived “choice” have a strong cultural statement to make, and they’re making it in a lot of ways. This is one. Finally, we’re seeing more of the reality behind another choice.