Festival showcases teen films

You get why certain girls have seen "Juno" three or four times, why they've erected websites in her honor. The movie flatters them in the same way that "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" flattered entitled boys: by making the title character the only star in the universe. Juno's father and stepmother just get in line behind her decision. Her mild-as-milk baby-daddy goes along with it. And the husband in the adoptive couple finds himself irresistibly attracted to how hip she is. This isn't a moralizing work, which in a sense is a relief since it'd be an After School Special if it mongered a message. As it stands, the movie isn't so much J.D. Salinger as Judy Blume, minus the heroine driven to push the panic button.

I just wished there were someone in the movie to challenge her. Better yet, I wish the movie had found a worthy outlet for her sense of superiority. Juno's kind of independence and certitude were what was missing from the other two popular hormone comedies from last year, "Knocked Up" and "Superbad." What if Seth Rogen and not Michael Cera had knocked up Juno? What might having to withstand the sleazy come-ons of a randy clown like Jonah Hill have brought out of her? Or, at the other extreme, how might she have dealt with the distinctly un-American circumstance of helping a buddy secure an illegal abortion under a dictator's regime, as Anamaria Marinca does in the excellent Romanian thriller, "4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days"?

These sorts of mix-'n'-match fantasies miss the point of the actual fantasy in "Juno." Director Jason Reitman conjures an adorable suburban playground out of tidy framing and "la la la" pop songs. Juno forgoes an abortion not because abortions are wrong but because having one would ruin the innocuousness the movie's going for. She doesn't raise the baby because that would cramp her style. It all looks pretty easy from her perspective. Juno totally explains it all.

The movie's popularity also resides in its privileged novelty status: Jamie Lynn Spears aside, the face of unplanned, underage motherhood in this country usually doesn't belong to level-headed middle-class white girls. It's doubtful that the same movie about a black or Hispanic teen would be as popular, just as "Ferris Bueller" would have seemed more like a social-problem film than simply a comedy had it been about a black kid who cut class to ride parade floats and embarrass the principal. The feel-good film about the pregnant 14-year-old Chicana, "Quinceañera," went nowhere in 2006.

Of course, it could also be that Juno is appealing because she doesn't exactly seem 16. It helps explain why Ellen Page is so good in the part - she gets to channel a disillusioned 30-year-old. Sarcasm and cynicism are characteristic of adolescence. So are certain types of emotional posturing. But the movie is a shameless work of glibness, too. The Juno character has been written to possess the mental processing style of an adult who casts her teenage experiences in the form she wishes they might be: the stuff of her own happy movie.

Juno might be the most well-adjusted misfit in the history of movies. Don't let the scowls and rolled eyes fool you. Look at that hamburger phone; she's Little Miss Sunshine.