Lady Bird opens
with our titular character, Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), who calls
herself “Lady Bird” and insists that everyone do the same, arguing with her
mother (Laurie Metcalf) in the car. It starts off like a typical
mother/daughter fight: she laments having to live her life in Sacramento and is
dead set on going to college in New York (or at least her romanticized vision
of it), while Mom is understandably apprehensive since 9/11 happened only a
year prior and tries to present some more realistic and less financially
straining options. When the conversation doesn’t go her way, she opens the door
and rolls out of the speeding vehicle. This scene sets the tone for the entire
film, and announces loud and proud how it plans to separate itself from the
flock of coming-of-age comedies. The directorial debut of mumblecore starlet
Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird starts off
strong and keeps the ball rolling.
Our story follows Lady Bird going through her senior year of
Catholic high school in Sacramento. She dreams of bigger things and wants to go
to an East Coast Ivy League school despite not having the grades or work ethic,
is embarrassed by her living situation with her hyper-critical mother, her supportive
but depressed father (Tracey Letts) and her adopted brother Miguel (Jordan
Rodrigues). Her final year of teenhood is eventful but not particularly extraordinary:
she joins the drama club, goes to school dances, sneaks out at night, tries to
lose her virginity, bonds with and drifts apart from her best friend (Beanie
Feldstein), fights with her parents, and rolls through the echelons of
adolescence with stubbornness and exasperation.
That may sound like a very typical coming-of-age film, and
in a lot of ways it is, but at its core it’s much more graceful and insightful than
these kinds of movies tend to be. It does a spectacular job of capturing the
turmoil of adolescence, but the one thing it portrays about that period in life
is the uncertainty: the uncertainty of who we really are, what we really want,
who we want to be, what the future holds for us, and the fear of stasis. Lady
Bird knows she wants to get out of Sacramento and move to New York, but we’re
not entirely sure what she plans to do beyond that. Her mom tells her that she
just wants her to be the best version of herself she wants to be, to which Lady
Bird solemnly replies, “What if this is the best version of me?” In a sense,
this could be seen as a prequel to Frances
Ha, which was just as much Greta Gerwig’s creation as it is Noah Baumbach’s.
There’s plenty of autobiography in the script (Gerwig also came from a working-class
family in Sacramento and went to Catholic school), but it’s also covered in the
fingerprints of John Hughes and fellow mumblecore pioneers Joe Swanberg and the
Duplass brothers.
Lady Bird herself is a fascinating character, in that she’s
loveable but not very likeable. She’s strong willed and ambitious, but also opinionated
and narcissistic. At one point she’s content with hanging with her best friend,
snacking on communion wafers and crying to Dave Matthews Band (you’ll never
hear “Crash Into Me” the same way after seeing this), and fawning over the
sweet Irish Catholic boy in drama club (Lucas Hedges), but suddenly she abandons
them so she can suck up to the popular mean girls and try to hook up with a bad
boy musician (Timothee Chalamet), going so far as to lie about them about where
she lives. But since her whole emotional journey is about discovering herself
and learning empathy, it fits that she would try on all these different
versions of herself that she wants to be and ultimately end up as an
amalgamation of them all. Saoirse Ronan gives her career best performance here,
and deserves an Oscar just for embedding humanity into a character that could’ve
easily been annoying or unlikeable. There isn’t a weak performance to be seen,
everyone pulls their weight, but it’s Ronan who truly shines.
Bottom line, Lady Bird
is a brave, tender film about empathy and self-identity. A spectacular debut
from Gerwig (even though it has that A24 Ending that I love so very very much),
it’s the kind of movie that she would’ve starred in ten years ago, and that
persona is made apparent all throughout. This could be seen as a woman’s letter
to her younger self, assuring that everything will turn out alright, and that one
day she’ll look back at all this craziness and have a good laugh about it.
8/10
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