“I don’t really know what kind of girl I am.”

This could well be a comment from any adolescent girl, but in Juno’s case, she is 16 and pregnant. She had planned on having an abortion, but instead opts to have the baby and let a couple who want a baby adopt it. From that brief description, what kind of girl would you say Juno is? Irresponsible because she is sexually active (and not using protection)? Virtuous because she accepts the consequences of her actions and finds an acceptable alternative to abortion?

Juno gives us a chance to consider how we judge someone—or perhaps even judge ourselves. It starts with Juno taking her third pregnancy test, hoping for a different result. Is that enough for us to know anything about her? Yet, eventually that will become how she is known at school. She’s always been an outsider, but soon she becomes the girl in school who is visibly pregnant, and seemingly unrepentant. She gets stares. People talk about her. But as the film goes on, we get a better idea of Juno as a person who isn’t defined by her pregnancy.

Maybe we need to understand her family to know her. She comes from a working class family. He mother abandoned her, but her father has remarried. It seems to be a fairly pleasant, loving home. The house and furniture aren’t out of Architectural Digest, but it’s homey, if a bit cluttered. Their house has a lived-in look.

That is a contrast to the home of Mark and Vanessa Loring, the yuppie couple who is looking to adopt a child. The first we see of them and their home is Vanessa making sure every little thing is perfect before Juno arrives to talk with them. Their home is large, neat and empty. They seem the perfect couple and ideal prospective parents for Juno’s child.

Juno and Mark hit it off right away. He’s a musician (and a bit of a slacker). They talk about music and slasher movies. It doesn’t seem like Mark has really made the transition yet from adolescent to adult. Not only do we not know what kind of girl Juno is, we begin to wonder if we know the kind of people the adoptive parents are.

Vanessa is self-assured and responsible (if maybe a bit too much of a perfectionist—trying to choose between two almost identical shades of yellow paint for the baby’s room). She knows that she is meant to be a mother. But can someone ever be ready to actually have responsibility for a new, fragile life? Is Vanessa ready? Is Mark?

Juno is not near as philosophical as I’m being—at least on the surface. It is light-hearted and witty. The dialogue resembles Gilmore Girls, but with a bite. It is a nice love story that has you leaving the theater feeling happy. But there are undercurrents that give the story some interesting dynamics.

For example, classism is a part of the story, although it is rarely explicit. It’s most obvious when we compare Juno’s family with Mark and Vanessa. It also comes up in a scene when Juno’s stepmother becomes very rude with someone she thinks is acting above her job title (and thus challenging her family’s standing in society’s pecking order). Class is often one of the ways we make snap judgments about people. We think we know the kind of person someone is by the house they live in or the clothes they wear.

What makes Juno so enjoyable is that it does not challenge us to think of Juno in a certain way, but that the film gives us a chance to discover who she is. We learn that there is much more to her (and to the other characters in the film) than we see on the surface. There is always more to people (including ourselves) than we first expect. It takes seeing them in times of stress and in times of joy to discover the kind of people they are.