Few of us would ever want to relive high school, but we’d go back in a heartbeat if we could be as fearlessly cool and collected as the 16-year-old protagonist of Juno. When the self-titled character (the supremely talented Ellen Page) finds out she’s pregnant, our heroine remains resolute in her unconventional decision to give the baby up for adoption. For nine long months, she lugs around a “fat suit she can’t take off,” deals with bitchy doctors and ignores the haters at school — all with a wit and vulnerable maturity that make Juno one of this year’s greatest pleasures.

The problem does not lie in the relative ease with which Juno decides to hand over the baby to its future parents (played by Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman), as abstinence activists might fear. No, the problematic character remains strikingly absent from the very beginning: the father, Paulie Bleeker, also 16 and clueless. Michael Cera’s dork charm is unnerving, from his wide eyes all the way down to his slender legs. But after Juno shows up on his front lawn to give him the bad news — that their tryst in a chair was more successful than expected — Bleeker almost entirely disappears. He gawks and asks what should they do, but aside from nodding when Juno says she’ll get an abortion (which she doesn’t), he doesn’t offer to help pay for medical expenses or drive her to doctor’s visits. Juno’s parents don’t tell her to stay away from Bleeker or make him help them; he is, without argument or discussion, simply free from the whole situation. His social ineptness is assumed to be the reason for his non-role. But that doesn’t explain why everyone else so easily, wordlessly accepts or overlooks his absence — including Slate’s Dana Stevens in discussing “how Juno is Knocked Up from the girl’s point of view.”

Juno does yell at Bleeker, once, by which point she’s extremely pregnant and uncomfortable. The point, of course, as in Knocked Up, is that Juno treks through all of it herself, making her independent, resourceful, a modern-day heroine in a teenager’s awkward body. But even though the father figure in Knocked Up was immature and incompetent, he at least offered to be around. Bleeker all-too-conveniently climbs back into Juno’s life at the very end — you know, when that whole “baby” thing is finally over. “He’s the cheese to my macaroni,” Juno sighs blissfully in the final scene, as if nothing has ever happened.

Juno doesn’t have to be about two clueless teens trying to raise a kid together against the odds; been there and seen that, thanks, and Juno and Bleeker is the last thing it should be. But it should have addressed a question that is a logical one, if not a moral one: Just where is Dad in all of this? Unmarried fathers walk away from mothers all the time, whose subsequent struggle to survive deserves, at the very least, an explanation. Letting Bleeker walk in and out of the picture so easily undercuts the sense of empowerment that Juno otherwise discovers so successfully.

–Stephanie M. Lee

Image source: Rotten Tomatoes

Superpregnant [Slate]

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