Ellen Page & Juno

Yesterday, The Independent featured an interview with actress Ellen Page. The reason why I read it was that I was really impressed with her acting skills in Hard Candy, a movie about a girl setting up a date with a paedophile in order to teach him one or two things about the world. It's a brutal film, but that's a good thing, mostly. Having read a few interviews with Page, I reckon she is a tough and insightful kid, who seems to be a lot more aware of & honest about the bad stuff going on in the entertainment industry than most actors. Last year, Little Miss Sunshine was nominated for Best Film at the Oscars. This year, the indie mafia is represented by Juno, the film in which Page stars the leading part. You might think it's dumb to be happy about Academy Awards nominations, but isn't it a good thing that decent films get the attention they deserve? I think it is.

I scurried off to watch Juno and it turned out to be worthwile. (After the one and only indie movie theater was closed a month ago, I have mixed feelings about going to the movies, but perhaps it's OK to support the few good movies that are box-officed.) The theme of the film, teenage pregnancy, could've been handled from the usual gender-stereotypical perspectives; women who are dying to have kids and are all gored-up in the depths of Womanhood or women being victimized by an unexpected pregnancy. Juno contained nothing of that, even though it did discuss these perspectives from a critical point of view. Juno is just a smart, tough kid who accidentally gets pregnant. She is not happy about it, but an abortion is not an option for her (and here the film did a fabulous job of presenting her feelings, which were not reduced to, for example, a positioning in relation to the "pro-life movement"). I think this is the best film I've even seen about pregnancy and child-birth, the reason being the way the film did not say anything general about the topic, "general" compared those movies that aspire to reveal Universal Truths about life and death. I don't say the film did not say anything at all about these things. It did. But I got the impression that the story was intended to make us approach things from a point of view where different experiences of pregnancy and child-birth are taken into account, rather than one experience being given the status of Essential Female Experience. (Juno's feelings about pregnancy were contrasted with those of the woman who was to adopt the child, the understanding, however worried, concern shown by her parents, the way her friend Bleek dealt with it - etc.)

I know I've got a thing for American indie movies (there are lots of exceptions of course). Perhaps that's a bad thing, I don't know. I appreciated Juno for the same reasons that I was blown away by Little Miss Sunshine - that is, for their lack of cynical world-weariness. I know there were things in Juno that we've seen in indie films before; quote-friendly dialogue, indie gems on the soundtrack (in this case, Cat Power and Kimya Dawson) and play with styles. But that didn't matter much. Juno made me happy. Having said that, my friend, who is even more immersed in philosophy-speak than I am, will accuse me of being "phenomenological". Perhaps that is what I am, I don't care.

PS: I am confused about this article - I think I get the point about the risk that actors are always made to represent a particular stereotype ("the nerd", "the funny guy", "the sexy cat") but I have some problems with the way Ramqvist tends to associate flannel shirts and converse sneakers with moral-panicking conservatives. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something.