Juno… So.  The chief problem with Jason Reitman's Juno is its repellent nihilism, but building up to this larger shortcoming is an array of lesser sins (among spare virtues) that render it unfit as drama or comedy or commentary.

The story here is that 16-year-old Juno (Ellen Page) has gotten pregnant by her dull wrestler boyfriend, played perhaps too exactingly by chinless wonder Michael Cera (of Superbad, where he was equally inert).

After some phony grappling with the abortion option (see also Knocked Up), Juno decides to give the baby up for adoption to a local couple (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) whose excrutiatingly appointed home is straight out of a Crate & Barrel photo shoot.  Meanwhile Juno must find the strength to break the news to her unflappable prole parents, whose low expectations are instant comic fodder, and she must deal with the usual teen fantasies of everlasting romantic love with whoever her lab partner happens to be this year.

The movie disappoints on nearly every level.  To get the superficials out of the way first, the soundtrack is nauseating, the sort of tuneless indie aural vomit produced by turning a dial and pressing a button AND OUT COMES QUIRKY.  In a similar vein the opening credits are done the way only six figure designers pretending to be first year art students can manage, a tired indie staple along with kooky dialogue, odd-looking characters, and sass-talking eight-year-olds.  Just having to look at Michael Cera onscreen for more than a few seconds is a depressing experience, never mind the stomach-churning sex scene he has with Page – which is not quite a sex scene but nonetheless is thoroughly unappetizing.

The adolescents in the movie speak through so many layers of sardonic detachment that it is impossible to like them or care what decisions they end up making.  Even this oldest of teen crisis gags is shrugged off with zero emotional depth, as if everything in their lives is just one big postmodern spoof that they need only respond to with the appropriate ironic youth jargon.  Their sole motivation in life is to produce flippant commentary about it.  It is difficult to conceive of a more profound emotional disassociation.

In one of the movie's few unintentional ironies, it is the neurotic yuppie couple who are the most human and consequently the most sympathetic characters in the story.  Jennifer Garner, in a surprising performance, is painfully anxious about her prospective adoptive motherhood, having been burned once before by another presumably less formulaically jaded teen mother.  Jason Bateman's comic timing is on display, as highlighted by the movie's trailer, but also of note is his understated portrayal of a failed husband.

But the movie's good points end there.  It is all resolved in a tidy, feel-good ending that manages two saccharine lies where it could have got by with only one.  It is moreso an affront in that it pretends to offer some serious or credible perspective on its subject matter, where it really has only glib patter and counter-patter, like a long cocktail party conversation as imagined by a narcissist with himself.