"Extensively quotable."- Among my wife's responses to Juno, which we had the joy of seeing yesterday evening. Juno is Diablo Cody's first screenplay, and she and director Jason Reitman exceeded my very high expectations with this charming, courageous, honest, and--even with its rapid-fire popular culture references--fully believable story.
The dialogue is extensively quotable, yet each line is perfectly situated in the narrative. Juno may be only 16, but her knowing allusions to music, movies, and TV shows before her time is not altogether unlikely in the age of blogs, Wikipedia, and YouTube. Kudos to Cody for using pop-culture references to define and develop her characters and for crafting characters who speak from who they are. Like the title character, the film is relatively short and pregnant with meaning.
A reoccurring image in the film is the guitar, and I think it is a fitting metaphor for what this movie's artists accomplish. Each scene seems fairly simple in its plotting and presentation, but the simplicity is that of a chord, a harmony comprised of many strings vibrating at once but with the result of one sound. Indeed, every scene vibrates. The plot moves in ways both expected and surprising, and the film artists perform with such subtlety and grace that each scene could conceivably go in many directions. I found myself not only questioning what will happen next, but also wondering what all is really happening now.
I'll save more particular analysis for a later date, but suffice it to say that if your experience of the film is like ours, you'll leave the theater misty-eyed and smiling.