Bayside resident Mark Metcalf, co-founder of Libby Montana restaurant in Mequon, is an actor who has worked in movies, TV and on the stage. He is best known for his work in "Animal House," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Seinfeld."
In addition to his work on screen, Metcalf is involved with the Milwaukee International Film Festival, First Stage Children's Theater and a number of other projects.
He also finds time to write about movies for OnMilwaukee.com. In this installment of the Screening Room, Metcalf takes a look at "Juno," which comes out on DVD today.
JUNO (2007)
I've been trying to figure out what it is that makes "Juno" work. The director, Jason Reitman, son of Ivan Reitman, does a good job. A lot of good directing is getting out of the way. Mike Nichols used to say that if you cast a play well, you had 90 percent of your work finished. Reitman has a good cast here. Some would be considered movie stars, but they are also good actors. There is often a difference.
J. K. Simmons and Allison Janney are particularly good as Juno's parents. They are very honest and real, funny and endearing, and you believe every second that they could have raised a child like Juno, who is, to say the least, unusual.
Jason Bateman is good enough, but he leaves something out; something is missing from the work. That may be because something is missing from the character. That may be the flaw, or the choice he has made. I tend to think that he just hasn't finished developing the spine of the character. And Jennifer Garner does a nice job of doing little in what we'd call a "departure" from her normal character. It isn't really much of a stretch and it isn't too complicated, but she does a good job.
Raiin Wilson, from "The Office," is great, and funny and obnoxious in a one-scene part. But the center of the movie, the real energy, the driving force, and maybe the reason the film works so well, is Ellen Page iun the title role, Juno Mac Guff.
She is an original, an eccentric, unusual, iconoclastic and unique ... all those words that describe someone you never really meet but wish you could someday. Page is great. She looks 14 and she just turned 20. She has a new movie about to open, "Smart People," and she looks even younger. She'll be around forever, and she's Canadian, so she has good sense and won't self-destruct. She's great, as I have already said a couple of times, and she was nominated for an Oscar just to prove me right, but I don't think she is the reason the movie works so well.
I think Diablo Cody is the reason.
She wrote it, developed it from her own story, if I believe what I read. And, she won an Oscar, to prove me even righter. She is the reason Page is so good. It takes more than a great actor to create a great performance. There has to be a script, a story and language, and an environment in which to work. Diane Keaton didn't create "Annie Hall" all by herself. Woody Allen had to see it in her, write it and then create the space for her to grow and flourish.
Cody wrote some remarkable language for Page to speak. The language and Cody herself, from what I have seen, are inspiration enough, if you are smart enough to see it and grab on to it, which Page obviously was, to create a great character. The energy is on the page with "Juno," and everyone involved was savvy enough to see that and get out of the way just long enough to jump on and go for the ride.
I find the movie to be surprisingly formulaic. There are no bad characters. Everyone is well intentioned. Some are flawed or incomplete. It has a happy ending, a predictable happy ending, and a Hollywood ending. It might even be considered sappy. But it works, because it has unusual energy in its language and in its courage and honesty against the world. When Allison Janney tells off the technician doing the ultrasound on her stepdaughter, it is the epitome of the film's clear-eyed insistence on honesty and truth telling.
Even the happy, happy ending can't erase that.
I have been a champion of Paul Thomas Anderson for a long time. I thought "Boogie Nights" was great. It was daring, surprising and unusual in its story and the filmmaking, the way the director watched the story with the camera, was equally so. "Magnolia" was a masterwork. He put Tom Cruise in exactly the right part and encouraged him to be as self-righteous as we now know him to be and he was nominated for an Oscar, for playing himself, or at least his mentor, L. Ron Hubbard.
He brought several different people and their stories together, the way his great friend Robert Altman did. And he saw Adam Sandler's violence and his softness in a great way, and told a strange, mythically true story in "Punch Drunk Love."
With "There Will Be Blood," the movie for which Anderson has received the most adulation, I think he fails. As a filmmaker, it is hard to fault him. The movie looks great. The soundtrack is as much a part of the landscape as the actors. Usually, you want the music to be a supporting player, to be invisible, or at least unnoticeable. He puts the music, the sound, right up front, makes it the central character in several scenes, and he succeeds.
And then there is Daniel Day Lewis, who seems to be a force of nature. I find the performance astonishing, but overwhelming. It precedes the movie, and it shouldn't. The struggle between good and evil, or the struggle to determine which is which, that is actuated in the relationship between Day-Lewis's character and Paul Dano, as the young preacher, should be the focus of the film.
But, I think, Anderson was so taken with Day-Lewis and the intensity and power that he creates when he works, that he forgot exactly what he had started out with and where he was going. It's a good film, no doubt, but I don't think it is a great film and it kind of has "great film" written all over it.
When I write about "Juno" I talk about good directing being about getting out of the way. And it may seem a contradiction to ask Anderson to take more control when it comes to Day-Lewis's performance. There are two differences. One is the difference between "good" directing and "great." It is true with good directing and even with "great" directing that you have to get out of the way, but you still have to herd the cats into a specific environment.
You have to keep the universe defined and keep it in balance. The other difference is the scope of the material. Sinclair Lewis, in the original story, "Oil," and Diablo Cody, with "Juno," are working on two entirely different canvases.
Anderson takes "Oil," and creates a parable for greed, progress, religion and the greatness that is perceived to be America, but is also its perpetual downfall. Now that's a big canvas. That's Guernica.
Cody writes a nice little story about a teenager who gets pregnant and makes some hard decisions. That's the modern equivalent of a Norman Rockwell cover for The Saturday Evening Post.
The criterion for judgment is the same: Does it succeed or fail? I think "Juno" succeeds. Granted the task set forth is not as demanding but it succeeds very nicely. Anderson fails, albeit at a much more difficult task. It is for another discussion as to which river you want to swim in as an artist.
Mark Metcalf is an actor and owner of Libby Montana restaurant in Mequon. Still active in Milwaukee theater, he's best known for his roles as Neidermeyer in "Animal House" and as The Maestro on "Seinfeld."
Originally from New Jersey, Metcalf now lives in Bayside.
