Ellen Page plays a quirky teenager in Jason Reitman's Juno but she does so in a way I've rarely witnessed before. She's not rebelling from medication like Natalie Portman in Garden State, nor is she just a normal, shy girl who is externally quirky like Tina Majorino in Napoleon Dynamite. Her peculiarities aren't her definition like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club, and she's not flippantly cute and brazenly poetic like Zooey Deschanel in Paul Gordon Green's All the Real Girls. Page's Juno MacGuff certainly has hints of all these characters, but what we witness of her comes from somewhere far off-screen. Remarkably, the world we're watching doesn't revolve around her.
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