I finally managed to see “Juno” in enough time to write this reply to publius’s naive suggestion that the movie be a model for anti-choicers, which is to say quit trying to ban abortion and just try to talk people out of it. In other words, be one of the many flavors of pro-choice. Watching the movie itself didn’t do much in the way of changing my argument, so I figured I’d keep my actual reactions to it here.
Contrary to the many anti-choice hopes out there, the movie isn’t an anti-abortion or pro-adoption polemic; on the contrary, it was a coming-of-age comedy plus teenage romance with teenage pregnancy as the hook. Credit to Marc for noting, as we left, that the character of Juno was an outlandish teenage character in the same style as Max Fischer from “Rushmore”, and the pregnancy itself functioned in the same way in this movie as Rushmore did in “Rushmore”. Demonizing the abortion clinic to explain why Juno doesn’t abortion (and thereby ruin the entire hook of the movie) is one of the sour notes that doesn’t work in the movie, but as a friend pointed out to me last night, it was probably the only choice the screenwriter had to get the script approved by Fox Searchlight.
The movie was a reverse of “Rushmore” in a number of ways. “Rushmore” was better in its first half, and “Juno” is much, much better in the second half. The first half of the movie suffered because Juno was too clever by half, and it made it hard to find her compelling. It became clear to me in the second half that Diablo Cody was trying to write about a character who uses her wit and allegiance to being cool as something of an emotional barrier, but she’s so enamored of Juno’s wit and cool in the first half that she overwrites the character, just a little bit. The script was so good that the lines that are just too much fall like clunkers; it would have been near-perfect if someone had come in with an editing pen and just trimmed up the few lines that are trying too hard.
But the second half was great. Like “Rushmore”, “Juno” had an intergenerational sexual tension conflict that comes to a head in a way that makes you want to hide under your seat in embarrassment for the characters, but this time the person with the inappropriate crush is the older one. I appreciated the whole arc with Jason Bateman; it really captured that crushing blow it is for young women when you deal with your first Nice Guy® who wasn’t your friend at all, but was using you as a cipher. But it was a really satisfying storyline, especially after she realized that while it seems flattering to have some guy compare the current or last woman unfavorably to you, it’s probably a load of bullshit that’s just going to make you feel foolish down the road.
Across the board, the acting was excellent. I’m particularly in love with Michael Cera, and this part seems like it was written for him, to capture that befuddled sweetness he manages to embody while still being hilariously self-mocking. What really made this movie, and why I suspect it’s so popular, is that it’s the first romantic comedy down the pipe in god only knows how long where the leads have actual personalities that you care about, instead of being the latest variation of “doucheball slacker meets uptight, personality-less but unbelievably beautiful woman”. Hopefully Hollywood will take note and realize that it’s not a profit-killer to have the female lead have that oh-so-threatening thing that we in the real world like to call a personality.
48 Responses to “The only way to let a romantic comedy character have a personality is make her with child”
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I really enjoyed the movie in spite of the supremely arch dialogue(nobody talks like that in real life), and the abortion cop-out.
Her abortion clinic freak-out didn’t bother me so much as the way it was so easily brushed off. But as i think about it, if they had tried harder to deal with the question, the movie would’ve ground to a halt and become an exercise in preachy didacticism.
Oh and i want to add that it was the performance of Michael Cera that really saved the movie for me.
Sounds like it might be a good companion piece to Ghost World, which is another of my all-time favorite coming-of-age movies. And it stars chicks, too!
I actually thought the abortion clinic was a clever touch.
Juno, like Knocked Up, runs into trouble right out of the gate because the majority of people like Juno or Heigl’s character would get an abortion. That’s why the pregnancy is a hook in the first place.
In Knocked Up, she sort of just decides against an abortion. It doesn’t ring true. What would get a person like Juno to make that decision? The abortion clinic from hell seems like a decent explanation to square the circle.
But overall, I think this is why we don’t need to read too much into either of these movies’ stance on choice. There just isn’t a plot in “successful young woman gets pregnant, chooses to have an abortion” - it just ends. So no need to worry.
There’s other ways that wouldn’t have been crappy writing that doesn’t ring true to get her out of the abortion, Noah. Like I said in my podcast, if she’d sat down with the counselor at the clinic and came to the conclusion that she’d rather give it up, that would have worked a lot better.
I got that too Amanda, the whole, “it’s got fingernails” both in the film and in the script kinda made me roll my eyes. I think it would have been better, and more effective to show the actual power of choice, if Juno had been told what all her options were by a doctor or counselor while at the clinic and we could see a young woman actually thinking it over and making her own decisions instead of just having a freak out and running off.
Overall I enjoyed the film but like most people that dialog grated my nerves after a while, and after Hard Candy Ellen Page has a fan in me:) And I liked that the parents weren’t’ total ignorant tools this time around.
I agree with Amanda - it seemed extremely jolting the way she decided against Abortion, almost as though Diablo Cody was ordered to avoid any meniton whatsoever that abortion might be a positive decision that might improve someone’s life. Perhaps, being male, my experience with Planned Parenthood and other choice providers is limited, but my admittedly limited experience is that choice facilities are clean, respectful and suprisingly comfortable places to be. One thing my (admittedly limited) experience doesn’t have is a bitchy, idiotic receptionist.
Another thing that really bugged me about that scene was the pro life classmate out front of the clinic. Yes yes, there are quite a few well meaning pro-life acitvists out there who, much like this character, really are basically decent human beings trying to do what they feel is right, and treating their subjects (Women seeking Abortion) with respect.
Then again, they’re usually outnumbered by a whole lot of assholes who seem to think the best way to convince a woman not to have an abortion is to call her a whore. Maybe it was a slow day and the Pro Life Fanatics went to the creation museum for the day, but the scene felt false.
Frankly, you could easily have portrayed planned parenthood (and similar organizations) as they really (usually) are - organizations staffed by dedicated professionals who really are risking their lives to help secure a constitutional fucking right - and still provided a funny scene in which Juno convincginly decides to have the baby instead of abort it, without making her decision an obvious sop to the pro life crowd.
Even so, as oddly jarring as the scene was, Juno is a fairly decent movie, so it still wasn’t nearly as noxiously offensive as the treatment of “smushmortion” was in Knocked up, where the only character who actually articulates the suggestion that Katherine Heigl ought to abort delivers one of the most offensive slurs against Pro Choice people I have ever seen.
Honestly, who in their right mind says “Then you can have a real baby later?” It seemed calculated to make the pro choice position seem calculated, cold and inhuman and I was unable to forget the scene for the rest of the film. Fortunately, Knocked Up sucks for a tremendous lot of reasons, so I didn’t have to dwell. But I digress.
Anyway, imagine if book censorship fundamentalists were blowing up libraries and shooting librarians. Would we be obligated to portray them as decent, well meaning goofballs, and librarians as intolerant, high minded jerks or uncaring idiots, just because the Jesus-Loves-Me crowd might get angry?
One thing that stood out about the movie is that it portrayed a middle-class (lower-middle?) family.
Movies and television shows always portray families or groups of friends who live in shiny, enormous houses in gorgeous neighborhoods and drive expensive cars.
I related to this movie because the characters were not all beautiful, their houses were not neat and tidy, and their interactions (save the dialogue) came off as natural.
So, I haven’t seen Juno, but I do have a question for the Pandagonians that isn’t completely off-topic. Any suggestions for movies that portray abortion realistically as part of a coherent plot line? I really liked Vera Drake, which was about an English woman who provides illegal abortions and gets found out when one of her clients has serious complications. Her family is horrified, one of her children calls her a murderer, but she thinks of what she does as “helping women.” But any movies from the perspective of the woman who has an abortion? It probably would have to be a movie in which the abortion is not the key plot point because if you had two hours in which an abortion was the key plot point, the movie probably would play into the idea that abortion always is a really traumatic event in the life of a woman.
Maybe I’m misinterpreting the movie, but I really don’t think a scene where Juno sits down with a counselor solves anything. I say this because I didn’t see anything in Juno’s character at any point in the movie that indicates that she would have kept the pregnancy, except that she did. She comes to accept it, yes, and uses it as a defense mechanism, but really, what would a counselor say? There had to be some deus ex machina.
Chingona:
There’s HBO Movie called “If These Walls Could Talk” about that subject. I haven’t seen it, though, so I don’t know if it’s any good. Ditto for another TV movie called “A Private Matter” about Sherri Finkbine, the host of a kid’s show called “Romper Room” who had an abortion in 1963 after finding out about the Thalidomide that she had been taking.
There’s also an episode of “Six Feet Under” where one of the characters gets an abortion; the character is quite matter-of-fact about the whole thing. To see that plotline was pretty refreshing.
Chingona- The movie “Cider House Rules” deals with abortion to an extent, if I recall correctly.
There’s always ‘Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days’ (about illegal abortion in 1980s Romania).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1032846/
any movies from the perspective of the woman who has an abortion?
Well, there’s Cabaret…
Im sick of movies like this & Knocked Up & how were aggressively told to shut up with your bitching & LIKE them because theyve offered up a scant amount of of possible token sentiment for the left but left the premise as something more ingenuous.
And i hate these fucking movies because they show how far we’re rolling _backwards_. 20-some years ago, in the midst of the Reagan era & solid conservativism in the culture, there was a movie called Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which not only had the 15yr old lead girl (Jennifer Jason Leigh) getting pregnant (in a beliveable if sad way), but also getting an abortion –AND not being punished or having to atone for it or wear some symbolic symbol of shame, etc. No; instead,her character was treated with some dignity & empathy for being a teen the bittersweet things that happen in those years, when youre struggling to be an adult… I hate movies like Juno especially, when theyre pushed forth so aggressively to the teen market & the character is held up as some kind of role model, & not just a character study in a movie… smart teen girls should be able to smell the whiff of disingenuousness that comes from giving a short shrift in the movie (by that abortion clinic scene) to the actual decision-making process that comes with an unplanned pregnancy, I would sincerely hope.
It occurred to me in reading about both Knocked Up and Juno and how they addressed abortion that the only movie I could think of where a character is shown going to a clinic to have an abortion in a basically sympathetic way was in of all movies “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”
I may have blocked it out but I don’t even really remember that part of the movie being really controversial.
Hmm a quick google turns up this article on the very subject:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/22wad8
“Since the election of the current President Bush, however, the times, they are a-slowin’ down again. On the DVD of “Fast Times,” director Amy Heckerling says that she “could never make that movie now,” because its depiction of guilt-free sex (and, presumably, consequence-free abortion) is “unacceptable in the current political climate.” In recent years, we’ve seen unmarried and unprepared women on shows like “ER,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” and “The O.C.,” choose to keep their babies, no matter what the consequences. It’s enough to make the convenient miscarriage plot seem downright progressive.”
If they really want to portray reality AND force the woman to give birth, they just need to set the movie in an area where there are no local clinics, where people are generally poor and can’t get easy transportation to larger cities.
A character who would really like an abortion, but her parents are religious and won’t let her …
A character who would really like an abortion, but no one will drive her the 3 hours or more one-way to get to the clinic …
A character who would really like an abortion, but she can’t save enough money …
There are so many other options. The situation in Saved isn’t all that far-fetched as far as the mix of religiousness/denial/ohshit, but I’d much rather see a movie that touches on the reality I grew up with, where a pregnant 14-year-old has only two options, and both involve childbirth. (Of course, that sort of movie wouldn’t be very funny, so maybe it wouldn’t do so well. We like pregnancy to be funny.)
Diablo Cody has said she wasn’t trying to make any political statement, it just that there’d be no movie, or not the movie she wanted to write, if Juno got an abortion. The script preceded any deal with Fox Searchlight to my knowledge (a spec script versus a for hire deal), and the studio’s main goal is money. The way the clinic scene played out for me was that Juno just didn’t like the vibe she was getting. The decision seemed very abrupt to me, but ehhh. It bothered me a bit, but ultimately I could live with it. I don’t know if the scene was longer originally. Heigl’s character is Knocked Up is much more inexplicable for me. I find it hard to believe a career woman in her specific circumstances wouldn’t at least talk about getting an abortion, and they really seemed to have been gutless not to do that - but again, they needed her not to get an abortion to have a movie.
I agree the script for Juno is overwritten early on, but has some real gems later, not coincidentally when it focuses more on character. If Cody and the gang say different about the whole abortion thing, that’s something else, but I’ve heard and read interviews with her and other members of the cast and crew. Per Cody’s intent, I didn’t feel Juno was making a grand statement about abortion; it was exploring a specific set of characters, most specifically a young woman “dealing with things way above her maturity level.” It’s an above-average film from a mini-major.
As for the other comments — Cider House Rules does deal with abortion quite a bit, yes, and portrays it as the moral choice or at least a necessary one. There’s a recent foreign film that centers on abortion, but its name’s escaping me right now.
First of all, with regards to posting comments on here—i posted a comment on “Fast Times atRidgemont High”, like, TWO HOURS AGO…& now i see someone ELSE has addressed it on here, but my comment has yet to be seen. This is really annoying & defeats the purpose of posting here, BOOOOOOO…fix it!
{Since the election of the current President Bush, however, the times, they are a-slowin’ down again. On the DVD of “Fast Times,” director Amy Heckerling says that she “could never make that movie now,” because its depiction of guilt-free sex (and, presumably, consequence-free abortion) is “unacceptable in the current political climate.” In recent years, we’ve seen unmarried and unprepared women on shows like “ER,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” and “The O.C.,” choose to keep their babies, no matter what the consequences. It’s enough to make the convenient miscarriage plot seem downright progressive.” }
Not only that, but this: :”Thelma & Louise”> It was written by a woman, who for as much as i know, didnt pander to studios by shopping a story around that they KNEW would easily be bought –ie, like one that treated abortions & PPclinics as something less than negative– unlike Diablo Cody. (Aside:
Didnt she just say that she wrote about things she experienced? So did she have an unplanned teen pregnancy? Just wondering)
How is this not going backwards? The fact that we get fed panderingly ‘workable’ scripts & are told they are progressive, doesnt make them so –& makes me feel like im being swindled of any real chance at something that can truly be considered art, frankly.
“Diablo Cody has said she wasn’t trying to make any political statement, it just that there’d be no movie, or not the movie she wanted to write, if Juno got an abortion.”
In short: Hey! Dont make the movie, then. The world can do without another stupid fucking movie that panders to the maddona-whore syndrome that is played out every day in real life by misogynists who really hate women. This may sound like an unfair rant, but in the context of the day-in, day-out world at large, it gets very wearing to be told what type of woman is ‘good’ & what is “bad”, etc…
um, not a movie, but on “degrassi: the next generation” Manny has an abortion, and deals with it pretty well, and she was still early into high school when it happened, if i recall correctly. of course, the episode wasnt aired here in the US til a few seasons later as the N thought it was too controversial, but finally showed it last summer.
and the illegal abortion situation in dirty dancing i think was handled well, and made the character who had it really sympathetic. then again, dirty dancing was again from the 80s like fast times, and degrassi is canadian.
oh, and while the character on The O.C., theresa, didn’t have an abortion, she discussed it with one of the parents on the show, kirsten, who did have an abortion and talked about it with her. later in the series they show a flashback of her going to the clinic for the abortion, so she could still go away to UC Berkeley like she had planned
yes, i have heinous taste in television and film.
I haven’t seen Juno, so I can’t say anything about how the subject is treated there, but I do remember that scene in Dirty Dancing. It came out when I was 11 and it was one of my sisters and my favorite movies (we still know all the dialogue and the dances–we’re very sad and pathetic people). But it never occurred to me until much later, probably in college, what that little side plot was about. I was amazed that something like could be handled so well in a movie with almost no controversy and that my mom let us watch it without any lectures when we were teenagers. And I agree, illegal abortion could never be treated that sympathetically these days. Penny would have either died or lived and be treated as a dirty slut (with serious fertility issues) for the rest of the movie.
they had a stupid “top 10 trends of 2007″ segment on Fresh Air a couple of weeks back and one of these trends was the concept of “hip sentimentality,” of which Juno and Knocked Up were the examples: that you could take an extremely maudlin, sentimental premise (both of them involving pregnancy), of people finding love and of everything “turning out ok in the end” and make it pallatable to people who would normally not swallow that tripe by dressing it up as “hip” with Gilmore-style dialog or dumb slacker jokes.
Nothing against sentimental crap, but it should at least star Meg Ryan and Hugh Grant and be honest about itself :p
Bat @ 18: Cody strikes me as a clever person, and maybe she did write the scene as it was initially. But doesn’t mean she wasn’t thinking about the cold, hard production issues. See the Amy Heckerling quote about how you couldn’t write Fast Times today. If you’re writing Juno with the intention of making it a real movie—and I’m sure she was—you know that you’re already testing the studios’ patience with a screenplay that ultimately concludes that teen sexuality is a good thing. Even worse, that loud-mouthed broads who wear jeans and flannel all the time can find true love. That’s political poison already, and you have to know that the pregnancy is what makes it palatable, because the girl gets punished somehow for it. (But then she doesn’t, not really, which is unrealistic in the sense that willful closed adoptions are vanishingly rare, but at least gets the job done of making Juno’s “punishment” not a punishment and closing on her actually being happy, despite Teh Sex.)
Add a positive, realistic view of abortion in there? You wouldn’t get the money men past that page. She had to have known that going in. She gives every indication of knowing how to be a woman in a man’s game. She probably didn’t want to make a political statement, but she knew she had to make one (abortion is Very Bad) while claiming that it’s not a political statement (male domination is just common sense, yo!) in order to get her largely sex-positive, pro-female movie made, I suspect. Now that I’ve built it up in my mind, I admire the sly passive aggression that quite likely helped her get this script green lit—now that’s an art form! I have reason to believe it, too. We are talking about the woman who disarms her threatening nature by forefronting her history as a stripper. Passive. Aggressive. But effective.
As for movies about abortion that don’t cow before the almighty anti-choice whiners? Well, there’s always Citizen Ruth. Don’t watch it if you’re touchy, though. The feminists are mocked, too, because this is Alexander Payne before he decided to explore men’s pain, and everyone is an object of mockery in his early movies. I love it, though. The feminists are made fun of, but they’re largely the good-guys-stuck-in-a-philosophical-quandary, which is trying to earnestly defend the autonomy of a woman who gave it up to drug addiction and general stupidity a long time ago, and when you also can’t quiet your judgments of this woman. “It’s all about choice,” does fall a little flat when you’re staring down a woman who needs to quit making babies and just passing them into foster care, even as you know that’s her technical right. But man, do the anti-choicers get torn up! There’s even a scene where Burt Reynolds, as a slick preacher type, makes his adopted “son” that he got from a woman he talked out of abortion oil him up and massage him. You get the impression that happy endings are part of the deal—what a damning statement about the intentions of the crazy anti-choicers.
Yes.
make it pallatable to people who would normally not swallow that tripe by dressing it up as “hip” with Gilmore-style dialog or dumb slacker jokes.
I wouldn’t call Knocked Up or “dumb slacker jokes” in general terribly subversive. The archetypal dumb slacker movie is as stickily sentimental at heart as any Disney cartoon or woman-mocking “romantic comedy.” Under the thick layer of semen and beer puke is the shining belief that a beautiful porn-worthy blonde who never farts will love your slobby ass someday if you just keep your chin up. Knocked Up stands out among the genre because it openly points out how pathetic its male characters are and how much they hurt the people they claim to care about, but pretty much any dumb slacker movie could end with the porn-worthy woman who settles for the slacker giving birth to his kid without the slightest shift in tone, and without any change in its potential appeal to cynical hipsters, who should already know what they’re paying for when they buy their ticket.
Gilmore-style dialog is harder to find in movies, obviously, but the majority of the Gilmore Girls fans I know who stuck around after the first season do not by any means find maudlin sentimentality difficult to swallow.
you have to know that the pregnancy is what makes it palatable, because the girl gets punished somehow for it.
They did get that nice scene of Juno whimpering in agony while she’s giving birth. It was realistic enough that I had to look away, so I bet the people who get off on seeing young girls in pain were pretty pleased with it.
As far as matter-of-fact abortions in films, Alison Anders’ Grace of My Heart has one, even though it takes place when abortion is illegal. It’s presented as the logical choice — she already has two kids, she’s left her husband for constantly cheating on her, what the hell other choice does she have? The movie also has a character who chooses to continue her pregnancy, and that’s presented as a valid choice for that character.
Ahh, Citizen Ruth, with one of my all-time favorite dialogue exchanges, as Ruth’s mother is publicly haranguing her from a helicopter:
I agree with the very mixed feelings about Juno. I thought it was hilariously written and acted–with a faster pace and a wittier style than most movies. I also see Juno keeping the pregnancy as a huge macguffin–it has to be for the movie to make sense, but it totally doesn’t make sense given the kind of girl Juno seems to be. She is not a sentimental, or gullible, or romantic girl at all. she has absolutely no illusions about the fetus or the pregnancy. so why on earth *would* she go through with it. I thought the whole “it has nails” thing and the grim experience in the waiting room was really forced, but forced in order to shove the plot along and make juno’s decision less a romantically “pro baby” one and more a negatively “fingernails? how dumb a reason is that” one. In other words: Juno’s decision to keep the baby isn’t valorized because its shown as, essentially, impulsive and immature not reasoned. And they continue to parody that in the scene where the girls decide to “look in the penny saver” where people seem to think they can get babies advertising next to cockapoos and pets.
But of course you could have had the same plot and pretty much all the same issues and dialogue if the film had only been honest about *just how hard it is* for girls to get abortions in most of the country. Cody could have written it so that Juno doesn’t *figure it out until its too late* or so that the *sympathetic parents can’t scrape the money together* or so that the Juno who doesn’t want the baby still waits until it quickens and then (foolishly but impulsively) decides to go through with it.
But there were so many, many, terrific things about this film–the fantastic scene where she tells the father and step mother and the wonderful moment when the step mother says of the boy “you *know* it wasn’t his idea” and the father happilly surrenders his fantasy duty of patriarchal authority ass whuppin and just shrugs and agrees that sex isn’t something men take from girls but something, in this case, that teenagers just *do*.
And didn’t people love the stepmother (Jesus is going to bring a little baby miracle into this garbage heap of a world?) rising to the occasion and fully exploring the sanctimony and class oppression acted out by the fetal ultrasound woman?
Its a mixed bag of a movie, but a sweet, tender thing. I guess I feel like it wouldn’t matter that it isn’t unequivocally pro-abortion (though it is pro choice) if we could count on lots of sweet, funny, movies being made where characters were shown to choose abortion because it makes sense for their lives. But of course we can’t. Because hollywood won’t make those movies–a movie about a teenager who gives up two unwanted pregnancies to adoption and then insists on an abortion the third time? Why isn’t that movie being made? A character like Juno who puts the baby up for adoption shown against the backdrop of other girls who did have abortion and didn’t suffer consequences for it?
aimai
Katha Pollitt made a good point, which is that most of the places in the Midwest, where Juno takes place, require parental notification or waiting periods, so she would be unlikely to just sail into a clinic and get an abortion on the spot anyhow.
So why not have her meet with a counselor, who tells her she needs to notify her parents, then have the fingernails encounter? It would still allow the pregnancy to go forward but also show how difficult it is for a teenager to get an abortion.
Another movie that presents abortion in a fairly neutral way is Teachers, which is from 1983 or so. Nick Nolte plays a teacher who drives one of his students to an abortion clinic. He does get in trouble for that, but I forget exactly why (like maybe she had complications or her boyfriend-who-she-couldn’t-tell ratted him out or it was just considered inappropriate interference for a teacher or something). I do remember the girl didn’t catch any flak, but he did.
Still, she could have put in a scene where the PP counselor says “If you’re wondering whether you should continue the pregnancy or have an abortion, remember how you felt when you first learned you were pregnant. When I found out I was pregnant, I felt very happy, so I had the baby. But if you felt scared, or angry, or sad, then perhaps it would be best to get an abortion.”
I agree that Juno’s choosing not to abort was probably the weakest scene in the movie — it could have been more feminist, more realistic, and more true to the character — but I wouldn’t be so quick to write it off altogether.
For one thing, it’s not totally out of tune with Juno’s character. She, like most teenagers, thinks she’s smarter and more worldly-wise and capable than she really is, and part of her coming-of-age is being forced to confront the fact that she’s not really grown up yet. The Jason Bateman story arc is one of those confrontations, and the abortion clinic is another. She decided not to go to her parents for advice or money and refused the help and emotional support of her friend because she thinks she’s too with-it to need these things, but when she gets there she’s confronted with the profundity of her decision, panics, and flees. It still bugged me that that was the end of that (Why wouldn’t she reconsider abortion once she’d calmed down?), but I don’t think her initial reaction is completely inexplicable.
Second, the fingernail thing is absolutely not ridiculous. Yes, it sounds dumb to all us feminists who think a lot about abortion and childbearing and their realities and consequences, but a lot of women considering abortion do hear that line, and it does work on some of them. A friend of mine got pregnant at 19 and was all set to defy her religious parents and get an abortion, but the doctor told her her fetus had fingernails. Another friend of mine (she was 26) found out she was pregnant when she went to the ER with stomach pains, and she heard the same factoid from the nurse who did the sonogram. Neither were even considering having children anytime soon when they got pregnant, and neither had a good relationship with the father. They both have young children now.
There just isn’t a plot in “successful young woman gets pregnant, chooses to have an abortion” - it just ends. So no need to worry.
I really wish people would stop saying that. That story was not the one Cody wanted to tell here, but that does not mean it is an impossible concept for a film.
There just isn’t a plot in “successful young woman gets pregnant, chooses to have an abortion” - it just ends. So no need to worry.
It is if the movie doesn’t just hinge on and is about something else besides the woman being pregnant. But if pregnancy is the point, then no, there is no story.
I really want to see this movie and my circle of friends isn’t into a ‘chick flick’, so I need to wait until I see my folks this weekend. Anyway, I loved Hard Candy, and from her appearances, Ellen Page really does speak like her characters in real life.
I’ve been a fan of hers since ReGenesis, where she played the daughter of the damaged but brilliant Dr. Sandstrom.
I think it’s really interesting what you noticed about the politics of this movie and what felt real to you, what might have been improved, and what was just perfect. It’s all from the prism of choice and teen sexuality. My wife and I saw a totally different movie, because we’re adoptive parents who have been on the other side of that table.
We walked out in tears. I saw a movie that explored some of the ethical issues with the domestic adoption of newborns, and showed both the placing bio-parents and adoptive parents as dimensional, living characters who are sometimes cool and edgy and other times immature self-centered asshats.
While it could have been more accurate about several plot developments–What lawyer schedules a meeting in the potential adoptive parents’ home? and In what metro area is it so easy for a teenager with no job to walk into a non-PP clinic that does abortions knowing she can have one that day, and make a decision to walk out that is entirely about her momentary impulse?–I also understand that there are length issues and the plot has to move ahead.
I was delighted with the depth of all the characters and jumped for joy at the ending scene, in the baby’s room. There was this dread that set in when Jason Bateman turned out to be an immature asshat, which was relieved only by finding out what she had written on the Jiffy Lube receipt. It was a fork in the eye of patriarchal expectations.
A portrayal of a teenager choosing to place her healthy perfect white baby with a 35 year old woman who is no longer married to the perfect white man, from the position of knowing for sure that being 16 didn’t make her garbage and the perfect Christian straight people worthy? Priceless.
Temporis: It really isn’t a chick flick. My husband enjoyed the movie as much, if not more, than I did.
My boyfriend enjoyed the movie a lot and laughed even more than I did.
Movies featuring women as protagonists are not chick flicks. Labeling them as such reflects an unwillingness on the part of men (or women who pride themselves on being “one of the guys”) to listen to women’s stories and take an interest in their lives.
A few things:
- A very good recent movie where the decision to have an abortion plays an important part of the lives of two of the characters is *Starting Out In The Evening*. It’s not getting a wide release, so you may have to wait to rent it.
- I’m not positive, but I believe that Bleeker fails the Bechdel Rule, were we to change the sexes (i.e., Bleeker never talks to another guy about something other than Juno). I liked Michael Cera’s performance, too, but using this rule put into stark relief the fact that his character isn’t that much different than the two girls in *Superbad* who are the objects of desire of the two male protagonists in that movie. Not a criticism, just an observation.
- Amanda, I’m not exactly clear on what you mean when you say that Bateman’s character “wasn’t [Juno’s] friend at all, but was using [her] as a cipher”. Are you saying that he used her as a catalyst to make a decision about his current relationship and his current situation in life? If so, I’m not sure what’s so wrong with that. Generally, don’t people engage with others and decide who they want to associate with based on those interactions? Bateman’s character decided he didn’t want his inner life confined to one room in his house, and Juno was a catalyst in deciding to change how he lived his life.
I’m a little surprised that everyone seems to think he’s being immature about this, when plenty of people here thought the ending to *High Fidelity* was a cop out because Cusak and his girlfriend weren’t right for each other. Yes, the timing is awful (at the very least, he should have gone on his own after he backed out of the first attempted adoption), but is the alternative of a brittle marriage with a newborn any better?
- Lastly, Amanda, I heard your podcast about “pregnancy film” last week, and I was very happy to hear that you felt comfortable talking about a work without having read/seen it first.
History; It doesn’t appeal to my usual circle of gamer buddies, who’ve chosen “In the Name of the King” as this week’s movie in spite of hating everything Uwe Boll has done. Sometimes I don’t understand. I chose instead to work a double shift.
My dad loves what he’s seen of the film and I intend to see it with my parents after I show them ‘Hard Candy’. I meant ‘Chick Flick’ as a genre rather than a gender restriction.
Way to miss the point, NY. I was deliberately brief, and went right out and saw it before I weighed in at any length, because unlike your buddy, I didn’t feel right talking about something I didn’t bother to learn about. Sorry I was hard on your friend; you sure do know how to hold a grudge against a woman who puts the smackdown on a young man who carries on at length about stuff he doesn’t know about.
“Djiril
January 12, 2008 at 8:36 pm
There just isn’t a plot in ’successful young woman gets pregnant, chooses to have an abortion’ - it just ends. So no need to worry.
I really wish people would stop saying that. That story was not the one Cody wanted to tell here, but that does not mean it is an impossible concept for a film.”
You’re absolutely right. See Trust by Hal Hartley.
The problem with Juno is that everything is just too easy. This is a bright high school girl. Does she ever do homework? Worry about college? Does she ever fight with her parents - really fight with them? Does she do drugs? Does she know anyone who does? Does she ever feel doubt, dread, self-loathing, fear, alienation? Is she ever at a loss?
No, no, no, no, no, and no.
Even putting the pregnancy to one side, Juno is not a real teenager, any more than Stewie is a real infant. And once you add the pregnancy the air of unreality overtakes everything. This isn’t remotely a realistic movie about teen pregnancy. It’s a feel-good fantasy. Which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it, because I did. But I always had the nagging feeling that I was being manipulated - because I was.
PS- Cerra is the least convincing track team member I have ever seen. The guy runs like he’s about to fall down. The character’s entire life is tied up with the team - how about getting someone who can run?
Amanda,
It’s not a grudge at all; I thought the rule that you, Faludi and Ducat were laying down was untenable, not to mention draconian (and there was no qualifier about the length of discussion when it was raised during the Book Club, it was simply “if you haven’t read/seen the work, then STFU”), and your voluntary mention of a work you hadn’t seen on your podcast reminded me how untenable it was.
(Ironically, due to all the complaining about that kid’s alleged unpreparedness, and the unpleasantness of about three posters, nothing talked about by the three of you explored anything in the book that you wouldn’t have known by reading Faludi’s Times Op-Ed, which is part of what that kid had actually read when he composed his article.)
And however much you’d like to twist it to gender bias, that has nothing to do with it either. If I ever caught Faludi (female) or Ducat (male) offering up an opinion on something they hadn’t seen or read, I’d be sure to point out their hypocracy to them, too.
SarahMC@38: Bingo! Even my sweet progressive husband automatically labels any film that stars a woman but doesn’t involve guns as a chick flick. Yet who WOULDN’T want to see “3:10 to Yuma”? That film is for everybody. So irritating.
My favorite bit of Juno was where the jock makes fun of her looks, and after a momentary pause where it looks like the movie will offer up the usual, “Look, this girl is a loser” take she turns it around and says, “They mock, but all jocks love weird chicks like me.”
In defense of Su-Chin the pro-life classmate…
This whole film has a lot of basically decent teens who make some mistakes. Bleeker and Juno make a mistake in not using protection (or at least not properly), and later make other mistakes in their relationship, and then Juno makes some mistakes in getting too close to Mark. Leah has a crush on an overweight, bearded teacher.
And…. Su-Chin stands outside an abortion clinic shouting “All babies want to get borned!”
To some extent, this does portray the pro-life movement sympathetically. However, we don’t see much of Su-Chin, but the brief encounter gives us the impression that she’s no more wise, mature, or “together” than the rest of her classmates. Can’t Su-Chin be a basically good-hearted and intelligent but also sometimes error-prone and inexperienced adolescent who gets caught up in the pro-life movement, which is unfortunate but for which we shouldn’t judge her harshly, just as Juno is a basically good-hearted and intelligent but also sometimes error-prone and inexperienced adolescent who has unprotected sex, gets too close to Mark, and makes some mistakes in her relationship with Bleeker, wich is unfortunate but for which we shouldn’t judge her harshly?
As odd as it sounds, Juno’s decision not to get the abortion because the fetus had fingernails really did kind of resonate with me. I mean, as much as we’d like to think that we have well drawn-out thought processes for every decision we make, particularly potentially life-changing ones like that one, I think much of the time there’s just something that clicks or doesn’t click. I’ve always been pro-choice just in a theoretical way, but it was really cemented for me–I finally understood why I felt that way–when a coworker was pregnant and I felt the fetus hiccup. One tiny, random little thing that changed the way I think about abortion and being pro-choice and that, I think, has made me a better feminist since.
Having Juno sit down with a counselor and discuss her options could have been a great testimony for the pro-choice side, but for me, that decisive moment did actually ring kind of true.
Well, there’s Four Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days which won the most recent Palme D’Ore at Cannes. Of course, two young women desparately seeking an abortion in anti-choice Romania isn’t exactly a comedy. And the abortionist himself is a slimy, nasty piece of work. And it’s sad that you have to go abroad to find a film that mentions abortion as, if not a positive, then a necessary thing.