“I
don’t really know what kind of a girl I am,” the title character reluctantly
admits in Jason Reitman’s Juno. Like
her, all of the director’s other protagonists are not as sure of themselves as
they would like to appear. Just as under the laugh track of Reitman’s movies
lie serious social themes, beneath the seemingly secure, brashly self-confident
shell his characters build lie fundamentally flawed, lost, damaged, or insecure
human beings. Thank You for Smoking
(2005), Juno (2007), Up in the Air (2009), and Young Adult (2011) all center on very
complex, realistic, deglamorized characters that find themselves in less than
ideal situations. The filmmaker’s refusal to shy away from difficult characters,
unconventional subject matter and ambiguity is one of the reasons he is a maverick
filmmaker. Reitman’s movies are deeply personal, experimental in both content
and form, blending light humor with dark undertones of social satire, and
perfectly capture the nation’s anxieties and culture of resilience. Most of
all, they are the movies he wants to make. While his father, Ivan Reitman, of Ghostbusters (1984), Stripes (1981), and Meatballs (1979) fame, “wants to take your favorite song and play
it better than you’ve ever heard,” Jason “want[s] to take a song you hate and
play it so well that you’ll learn to like it” (Jacobson 20).
