Juno
After Juno (2007) has been nominated for tons of awards, been deemed movie of the year by our favourite film critic, Roger Ebert, and garnered a screen writing Oscar for first-time screenwriter Diablo Cody, who but an idiot would say the film was not particularly good and the main problem was the script?
While I enjoyed the film and felt it well worth seeing, I can relate to the only criticism you hear of the movie: “Teenaged girls don’t talk like that.” This is quickly and erroneously refuted by saying, “People in movies never speak like people in real life.” Whoa, let’s slow things down. Yes, it is true that movie dialogue is not everyday speech transcribed, and I think most people know that. So what people mean when they say “Teenaged girls don’t talk like that” is more like this: “When some movie characters speak a script, they create the illusion for us that certain people really speak that way, and the characters thus seem realistic. But when Juno speaks the script, she doesn’t create the illusion that certain teens really speak that way, and, consequently, her character doesn’t strike us as being as realistic as it could be.” I agree.
The foregoing compares the character in a movie to real people in real life. But you can also ask if Juno is a cohesive, unified character in and of herself, regardless of how realistic she is. And the answer, I think, gets us closer to why some people have found the dialogue and the movie lacking. At some times, Juno has the feel of a unified personality. When she dogged tries to work things out for herself and when she persistently attempts to do the best thing for the baby, she projects a convincing cohesiveness. But in some of her hip dialogue, she seems more a hollow mouth-piece for wit and cool. When, for example, she changes topics from serious to trivial without warning and without changing tone of voice, she lacks convincing motivation. Dude. In other words, we cannot say to ourselves, “As well as I know that young woman, she did that because . . . (she was nervous or she lacked self-confidence or whatever).” Now, the rejoinder to my argument would be “Ah, but Juno sometimes appears fragmented because, as she says to her parents, she doesn’t really know what kind of a girl she is.” But there are two kinds of fragmented. In one, we sense the character has some kind of integrity or core; in the other kind of fragmented, we get nothing but bits and pieces with no strings to tie them together. Of course, it is difficult to make someone seem fragmented and simultaneously a coherent person acting from an identifiable essence. But it can be done, and a better script could have done it for Juno.