Juno
Directed by Jason Reitman

A  debate has arisen about whether the out-of-nowhere smash hit comedy Juno--a box-office sensation and the sleeper candidate for Best Picture Oscar--is a pro-life document and, therefore, a cultural landmark of sorts. Rick Santorum, the former senator, says it is. He points out that the title character, a 16-year-old Minnesota girl, sets out to abort her fetus but is then told by a good-natured classmate demonstrating outside the clinic that the unborn child she is carrying has fingernails. Santorum is very excited by Juno's decision to have the baby, so much so that, he writes, "I begin this new year with greater hope for our culture."

Michael Currie Schaffer, writing on the New Republic's website, scoffs at the notion that there is anything new here: "Abortion has long been a rarity in celluloid life, where all kinds of improbable moms bear all kinds of inconvenient children in order to produce all kinds of plot lines. .  .  . Unfortunately for the culture warriors of the right, on-screen childbirth says little about our national progression towards hell in a hand basket."

Schaffer is right. Juno is only anti-abortion if one thinks a cinematic depiction of a character who chooses not to have an abortion and suffers no adverse consequences from that decision turns that decision into a political and moral statement. But he is also terribly wrong. Juno is very much a movie that takes a firm stand against "our national progression towards hell in a hand basket."

But the enemy of all that is good and true and noble here isn't the abortionist. It's the hipster.

Juno is a devastating--indeed, almost inarguable--polemic against cool. The movie offers its delightfully drawn title character two paths, the way of the hip and the way of the square, and teaches her that the way of the hip is an emotional dead end. Juno (Ellen Page) is one hip 16-year-old. Indeed, Juno is so hip that she speaks in her own wiseacre slang. ("Hello," she says when she calls the family-planning clinic, "I would like to procure a hasty abortion.") Born in the 1990s, Juno comports herself as though she were a 1970s teenager, listening to Iggy Pop and speaking on a vintage Me Decade phone in the shape of a hamburger. What's more, Juno knows perfectly well how hip she is, asserting with confidence that the star of the football team wants her because she's not the head cheerleader.

One evening she decides to amuse herself by fulfilling the dreams of her extremely un-hip best friend, Paulie (Michael Cera, the off-kilter comic original from Superbad). He's a gangly boy who uses deodorant on his thighs before he goes out running and is addicted to orange Tic-Tacs. While her pregnancy understandably mires her in self-obsession, she fails to notice that Paulie is desperately in love with her and that their intimacy has only deepened his feelings for her. She, playing it light as every hipster must, begins suggesting names of other girls whom Paulie should take to the prom. Diffident down to his toenails, Paulie obeys her directive. And it is only when she discovers he is doing what she suggested that she realizes the depth of her feelings towards him.