(QuickTime)

If Knocked Up was this year’s unplanned pregnancy story that taught us that just because we’re adults doesn’t mean we still don’t have a lot to learn, Juno is this year’s unplanned pregnancy story that teaches us that just because teenagers haven’t become adults doesn’t mean they can’t teach us all some very valuable lessons.

She may only be sixteen. She may still have a lot to learn about who she is and the world in which she lives. But when it comes to what she knows, what she doesn’t know, and everything she’s still figuring out, Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) is one chick who understands that all we can do with the truth is accept it, and the best we can do with what we don’t know is to figure it out using what we do.

Cue the opening scenes of Juno as the young girl by the same name downs what looks to be over a gallon of Sunny Delight, takes her third pregnancy test of the day inside her local mini mart bathroom, and hangs out with the clerk while both wait to see if this one will have a plus sign too. Can’t say that’s exactly how I’d handle the whole what-if-I’m-pregnant deal, but for Juno, dealing with it any other way would just be ridiculous. It’s reality. It’s right in front of her. Why try to pretend it’s not there?

And once that reality is there, the journey that Juno takes to face it is just as perfectly real and comically brilliant as the way she faces it all in the beginning. First step, acknowledge the situation. It started with a chair. It continued with some sex. And all signs say it’s heading straight towards an infant.

Second step, arrange to stop it before it gets any “worse.” Hello, I’d like to procure a hasty abortion. I’m sorry, just a sec. I can’t hear you, I’m talking on my hamburger phone.

Third step, inform goofy track star father about his child… at 7 am, on his front lawn, in a Lazyboy, on a rug, next to a lamp, while sucking on a pipe.

This is the sit. This is how it’s goin’ down. Later.

Or, if the baby has fingernails, like everyone else has fingernails, like you have fingernails, and the lady on the other side of the room has fingernails, and the lady next to you has fingernails… return to step two. Look in the Penny Saver for the perfect couple to raise the baby with fingernails. Inform your parents about the baby with fingernails. Meet the perfect couple. Sign the right papers. And wait nine months to hand the baby off.

As Juno herself says, there are definitely some things she doesn’t know, at least one of them being exactly what kind of girl she is. But when it comes to facing her pregnancy, the thing that strikes me most about Juno is that she is all about putting her full confidence in everything she does and every decision she makes. As she tells Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner’s Mark and Vanessa Loring when they first meet about adopting her baby, if she could give them the baby right now, she would. She doesn’t need to sift through others’ opinions, to figure out how to be politically correct, or to decide if it still “feels” right in the end. Who she is and the decisions she makes are based on what she knows to be true, what she believes to be of value, and nothing else.

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