Troubled charmer: Juno

The deal with Juno is that it is very difficult to dislike. Part of the charm is that it can’t be slotted in any one category: it’s not a pure romantic comedy, a drama or a teen comedy, but in a very artistic way it is a combination of all three. I can’t remember the last film that pulled something like that off successfully. I guess there’s a reason why the acclaimed film critic from the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert, rates it as number one on his list of the best movies of 2007.

One of the introductory scenes in the film shows Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) downing American orange juice brand SunnyD by the carton, to ensure there is no problem getting results with a pregnancy test. Luck is not with her, and she soon finds herself telling her best friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby) that she has indeed, ‘honest to blog’, been knocked up. Leah’s response is ‘shockingly cavalier’, as Juno puts it, till she realizes she is not being had, upon which she does a double-take and fittingly replies, ‘Oh Shit! Phuket! Thailand!’

Ellen Page is so real, it is easy to believe anything she spouts - and she does. Pearls of Juno-wisdom are delivered calmly or sarcastically as the case might be, at a dizzyingly rapid pace throughout the film. Of course Jason Reitman did a brilliant job of directing her, but honest to blog, as Leah might say in the film, the real star of this film is Diablo Cody’s script. Almost every single line in the film is such a remarkably funny pun that it makes it difficult to stop either smiling or laughing constantly.

Juno, a teenager wise beyond her years, decides to put the baby up for adoption. She finds an ad by Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner), a young affluent couple looking to adopt, in the local PennySaver newspaper. You’d think that things would go smoothly from here on, but no, they don’t. Come on, how predictable would THAT have been? And if you know anything about Juno by this stage, you know she is anything but. The look on the Lorings’ face, for example, when Juno goes to visit them with her father for the first time, and when offered Pellegrino, Vitamin Water or orange juice asks for ‘a Maker’s Mark. Up’, is priceless! Juno is as different from them as chalk from cheese, but realizes that they would provide the baby something she wouldn’t be able to – a stable and loving home. Once the closed adoption is agreed upon, she springs a visit upon the two every now and then to get to know them better, except all isn’t well in paradise, as she soon discovers.

Michael Cera plays Paulie Bleeker, Juno’s boyfriend in the film. Technically, as Juno might say, he isn’t her boyfriend for most of the film but after he learns that he was the one who got her pregnant, he faithfully decides to stand by her till the delivery. Cera’s baby face is very well-suited to a role like this – that of a sixteen-year-old high school kid who is reticent (unlike Juno) and charming (quite like her) at the same time. The dynamics between Juno and Paulie would soften any heart. Again, full marks to Diablo Cody for coming up with lines that are so believeable, and to Page and Cera who are remarkable actors : when Juno tells Paulie that she thinks she is in love with him, he says ‘as friends?’, she replies, ‘No, I mean, like, for real. 'Cause you're, like, the coolest person I've ever met, and you don't even have to try, you know...’ and Paulie admits honestly that he, in fact, tries really hard to ‘be cool’, which is evident as we follow his interactions with his school friends through the film.

If a charming, sensitive, funny and extremely well-made film is your kind of thing, then watch Juno as soon as you can. It’s the best thing you’ll do all day.

Published in iProng Magazine, May 7th, 2008

The Psychology of the Strong: The Counterfeiters

No matter how many times you see a film that has to do with the horrors of World War II, you will not cease to be shocked. The Counterfeiters is another of those stories based in the concentration camps of Germany during the war. I say ‘another’, but not condescendingly. I say it with respect. The full respect that this true story is due.

Salomon Sorowitsch, or Sally, is a master counterfeiter. His Jewish heritage leads him to being incarcerated by the Nazis along with a group of other ‘professionals’, but away from the rest of the unfortunate captives who are led to their death day after day. Their expertise earns them minor comforts - a soft bed, the odd cigarette - in return for the manufacture of fake currency, with which the Germans aim to flood the British and American economies and bring about their downfall.

Through the various characters in the film, The Counterfeiters examines the psychology of both kinds of humans that survived the Nazi camps. One was the kind that was glad to just stay alive by virtue of the skills they possess (I recall Sophie’s Choice, for example, where Sophie was also put to work, and thus saved, by her skills as a stenographer while a prisoner in Auschwitz), and the other were people who were consumed by guilt at being alive when so many of their fellow prisoners, including their families, were gassed or shot in multitudes. It is difficult to pronounce a value judgment in times of war, and I have come to realise that one should not even try. However, one thing that cannot be argued with is that staying alive during the war was in itself an incredible achievement, and as we follow Sorowitsch and his fellow inmates in this film, we realise how valuable their achievement was.

The Counterfeiters joins my list of Sophie’s Choice, The Lives Of Others, Life is Beautiful and Schindler’s List as films about World War II that will stay in my memory.