Your New Year's Resolution, should you choose to accept it: go see Juno. OK, so I am giving away the store by telling you up front that Juno is a great movie and you should run, not walk, to see it. I'm also recommending Bella, an indy arthouse film with similar themes of unwanted pregnancy and the support of family.
Most of you probably know the premise of Juno already: a sassy 16-year-old gets pregnant out of wedlock and discovers to her surprise that she can't quite go through with an abortion although, as she says, she has heard the troubling rumor that pregnancy often leads to an infant. Which is undesirable. So she answers an ad in the Penny Saver from a perfect-seeming 30-something couple looking to adopt. Before I saw the movie, I read several coy reviews that suggested this couple (sensitively rendered by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) are not what they seem. That’s true, but it’s not as sinister as it sounds. They’re not hiding deep dark secrets; they’re just flawed, complex people who love each other but disappoint each other too – very much like people in real life, but very unlike people in most 90-minute comedies. What ensues is a coming-of-age story that manages to be 
both hilarious and thoughtful. Ellen Page deserves every bit of the Oscar buzz she has been generating for her role as the title character. Juno is on the surface a tough-as-nails, sardonic wiseass, a hundred pounds of hoodied ’tude. However, she is never cynical about people, and in fact reveals a heart so pure and loyal that it broke my heart. I can’t remember the last time a film made me laugh and cry simultaneously, but the combination of Page’s performance and Diablo Cody’s edgy screenplay did just that. I would love to see Page nominated for an Oscar. (She will never win, because comedies are notoriously overlooked by Oscar and because of the Kate Winslet rule: beautiful actresses cannot win an award until they make themselves ugly. See Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball, Charlize Theron in Monster, and Nicole Kidman with an unforgivable schnoz in The Hours. Ellen Page never stops being adorable in this movie, even when she’s about to drop a kid, so she’s automatically out of the running.)
Another movie out this winter in limited release addresses many of the same themes as Juno, but with an earnest, almost treacly emotionalism. Bella is an arthouse favorite that won the audience choice award at the Toronto Film Festival. In it, a waitress at a family-run Mexican restaurant in New York is fired for repeated tardiness. In protest, chef José (who is also the brother of the restaurant owner) follows her out and they wind up spending the day together. He learns that she is pregnant and quietly sets about teaching her the value of her baby, whom she plans to abort. Bella is a beautifully filmed movie, where whole stretches go by with no dialogue and the director (a first-timer!) relies on visual symbolism to invoke a feeling. It mostly works, and I happened to like the dreamy and non-linear quality of the storytelling; the saintly José, of course, has a past, which is carefully explored through flashbacks. But that same non-linear quality makes for an ending so ambiguous that at the end of the film, a stranger approached me and my friend Peggy and asked, “Did you understand what just happened? What really happened there, anyway?”
Bella is a deeply Christian movie, and it offers a profound message not only about the sanctity of human life but also about the power of redemption from sin. It is well-executed and very moving, especially considering that it was created on a shoestring budget by people with no reputation or hope of national distribution. Now that they have managed to get some decent distribution, my fear is that only about 3.5 Christians in America will actually see this movie. So many Christians seem to be put off by the whole indy/arthouse scene, if they even live in cities large enough to have access to it. But the irony of that is that if you took out all the subtitles and tidied up the ending, this movie is perfectly in line with mainstream American flicks made by various evangelicals. It even has the overwrought emotion down pat, which was my chief criticism—in my view, less would have been more. But it is a lovely movie overall, and well-deserving of a larger audience than it is likely to get. If it doesn’t play in any theaters near you, it will definitely be worth a rental.
Just saw Juno, and we loved it. I just blogged about it and linked to your post.
Posted by: Al Hsu | February 13, 2008 at 08:08 AM