Carry on up the duff

THERE'S a scene not long into the perceptive, if contrived, teen pregnancy comedy Juno that finds its eponymous, self-reliant 16-year-old heroine ringing the local clinic, Women Now, to “procure a hasty abortion”.

The call is interrupted when her plastic hamburger phone goes dead. She jiggles it briefly to regain the connection and the appointment is made. Like the malfunctioning device, Juno the film isn't particularly practical but it does represent this season's definition of eclectic cool.

In fact, this much-praised American film, with its facile world view and elaborate hipster patois, is only nominally about reproductive choice. The principal agenda seems more like the empowerment of its lead character and the creation of an eccentric cocoon of loving family and same-wavelength friends through which she can gain the confidence to be herself and make her own decisions.

“In just 30-odd weeks we can pretend this never happened,” she says brightly, tipping the film's true inclination towards entertainment. Not that there's anything wrong with that: when Juno is funny, it is unabashedly uproarious. It's only after a series of conveniently happy endings that lingering apprehensions over the film's message, or lack thereof, might surface.

Though it shares the same subject, the emotional territory covered here is nowhere near as deep as in the harrowing Romanian drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days. Even Knocked Up seems weighty in comparison. With its worship of the zeitgeist and lack of concentration, Juno feels like it was made by the coolest kids at school.

As it happens, Juno MacGuff (played with an exquisite balance of acerbic wit and aching uncertainty by the busy 20-year-old Canadian Ellen Page) can't bring herself to go through with the procedure and isn't even sure why. Without much additional thought, she chooses instead to give up the baby to an affluent young couple, Vanessa and Mark Loring (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman).

When Juno first presents herself, gulping orange juice to take a third pregnancy test, she's already approaching her second trimester. “I know that people are supposed to fall in love before they reproduce,” she says with the myopic confidence of the particularly precocious, “but I guess normalcy isn't really our style.”

The plural in that declaration refers to the child's father, Paulie “Bleek” Bleeker, played to timorous perfection by Michael Cera, who was a latter-day Lou Costello to Jonah Hill's post-modern Bud Abbott in last year's gloriously profane Superbad.

Juno engineered the chair-bound one-off tryst that led to her condition, and seems to want nothing more from Bleek than his approval. Which he gives, unreservedly. An aspiring track star on the Condors squad of Dancing Elk High School, he seems gobsmacked by developments and spends a good part of the film in a passive daze, chewing on his orange-flavoured breath fresheners and smiling tolerantly.

Though she's scared to tell her parents, she needn't worry: her father Mac (the always-dependable character actor J.K. Simmons) is all bark and no bite, and her stepmother Bren (Allison Janney, from The West Wing), is fiercely protective of her right to screw up. The scene where Mac and Bren evaluate the aftermath of Juno's announcement is a gem of comic writing and deadpan delivery.

In fact, so down is everybody with Juno's pregnancy and her decision to have the baby that it isn't until Mark confides to Juno he's leaving Vanessa that the film develops anything resembling serious conflict.

The verbal wit comes thick and fast, thanks to the dexterous wordplay of free spirit stripper-turned-screenwriter Diablo Cody. As she told American talkshow host David Letterman, “If this writing stuff doesn't pan out, I'm getting right back on the pole.”

The florid teenage vernacular, an unstable brew of the jaded and naive that cries out for its own glossary, is at once determinedly impenetrable and howlingly evocative. A typical phrase is “for shizz up the spout”, with its connotation of pregnancy.

It isn't until the barrage of one-liners and slang recedes that some moviegoers may discover that beneath the hipster surface lurks a girl-power fable.

The complexities of giving an infant to another couple are mentioned but not really addressed, and any remorse Juno may feel is minimised in favour of those aforementioned happy endings: Juno gets Bleek, who's just won a track meet; Vanessa is given the baby; the audience receives non-threatening closure.

Director Jason Reitman, the son of Czech-born Canadian comedy director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters), made a mature and confident debut two years ago with the multi-character, big-business satire Thank You for Smoking. While a less complex undertaking, Juno also showcases his precise handling of actors; it takes little imagination to picture, in the hands of a more timid filmmaker, a few of the more pivotal scenes spinning out of control.

Though set in a Minnesota suburb, Juno was shot in and around Vancouver, British Columbia. Noted “anti-folk” singer-songwriter Kimya Dawson leads a carpet-bomb soundtrack attack that mixes intricate couplets of contemporary teen angst with well-planted chestnuts from Buddy Holly, the Kinks and Mott the Hoople.

“I don't really know what kind of girl I am,” Juno tells Mac. This movie, on the other hand, knows exactly what sort of blithely spirited comedy it is, and which hard realities to avoid.