"Yes, I'm calling to procure a hasty abortion," says sixteen-year-old misfit Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) into her hamburger-shaped phone. By this point, only a handful of minutes into Jason Reitman's much-hyped followup to Thank You for Smoking, and not long after an animated opening-credits sequence set to a chirpy nouveau-folk tune by Kimya Dawson, some viewers will already be experiencing severe indie-quirk overload. But while first-time screenwriter Diablo Cody's dialogue does tend toward the super-stylized, her spiky tale of a pregnant teen who decides to carry the baby to term and hand it over to a barren yuppie couple (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman) boasts so many moments of sheer anarchic giddiness that it rarely feels precious. Indeed, no exchange all year has given me such a quick hit of pure joy as the one in which Juno is introduced to the adoptive parents' attorney, Gerta Rauss, and immediately repeats the name at the top of her lungs in an obnoxious Hogan's Heroes accent: "Gerrrta RRRRAUSSS!"
A distaff version of last summer's hit comedy Knocked Up, Juno makes a even more ambitious attempt to meld yuks and pathos, with shakier results. Superbad's Michael Cera, as the fetus' actual father, does his usual winning mumble-and-wince routine, but it's Bateman's prospective dad — a successful jingle writer still holding on to his adolescent dream of being a rock star — who threatens to push the film in a genuinely troubling direction. He and Juno become fast friends, bonding over Mott the Hoople and trashy gore flicks, but the instant he makes his less-honorable intentions clear — for him, Juno isn't so much his road to fatherhood as she is a means of reasserting his street cred—the movie beats a hasty retreat to sitcom safety, ultimately concluding on a would-be-adorable note involving yet another cloying Kimya Dawson tune.
Still, this dramatic copout, while disappointing, doesn't make the film's innumerable one-liners and sight gags any less hilarious, and Page's quicksilver performance in the title role is already justifiably the stuff of legend. Like Thank You for Smoking, Juno is less than the sum of its parts, but those parts are so entertaining that you don't mind too much. — Mike D'Angelo