“Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?”
Christine McPherson is a determined young woman, consumed with the drama of her less-than-ideal living circumstances and bored by her hometown of Sacramento, California. She has wild aspirations of living on the East Coast with her fellow free-spirits and hedonistic creative types, all the while believing herself to be a diamond in the rough. She also happens to have given herself a new name, “Lady Bird,” and thus our journey begins, with writer-director Greta Gerwig’s deeply relatable new film, Lady Bird.
The central conceit of Lady Bird isn’t entirely new, with our heroine being the type of strong-willed, special teen we’ve seen in countless coming-of-age teen comedies. She falls in love, she bickers with her parents, she dreams of being anywhere but home. All of these concepts have been covered in film through many decades, from James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause to the baby boomers in American Graffiti to Ellar Coltrane’s Mason in Boyhood, who we literally watch come of age before our eyes. Where Lady Bird stands out from being just another story about a teen growing up, though, is in how accurately it captures what the world feels like at 17 while still showing us that each and every one of us has lives of our own. One of the biggest flaws in moviemaking is when it’s clear that the writers only care about developing its central character, while everyone around them is entirely defined by how they relate to this one character. They’re “the girlfriend” or “the mom” or “the teacher,” but you couldn’t say much about them otherwise. They barely seem to exist outside the specific story the writers want to tell. This is not the case with Lady Bird, which gives us a well-defined title character but also a collection of people around her that feel so real that any of them could be a compelling lead in their own story.
Lady Bird, played by the luminous Saoirse Ronan, has a strained relationship with her mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf), a nurse working in the pysch ward who struggles to find common ground with her eccentric daughter. The ambitious teen wants to go to college on the East Coast despite her parents not being able to properly pay for it, though her patient, weary father, Larry (Tracy Letts), just wants to see his daughter shine, even if it means going behind his wife’s back a few times to help her out. She also has a brother, Miguel (Jordan Rodrigues), who is clearly a different race than the rest of the McPhersons but his adoptive status is never mentioned in the film. This kind of effortless integration just shows Gerwig’s intelligence as a writer. While the film is just 93 minutes, we get to see Marion’s life as a nurse working tirelessly to provide for her family, Larry’s difficult battle with depression, and Miguel embracing who he is with girlfriend Shelly (Marielle Scott). Metcalf in particular delivers one of the best performances of her career without an ounce of pretense. At Catholic school, Lady Bird bonds with her nerdy best friend, Julie (Beanie Feldstein), who struggles with self-esteem, and falls in love with theater kid Danny (Lucas Hedges), who’s trying to figure out his identity, while she also falls for the dark and mysterious Kyle (Timothée Chalamet), who is so wonderfully full of shit. The cast is filled out by some of the best veteran actors out there, like Stephen McKinley Henderson and Lois Smith.
Of course, Lady Bird belongs most to Lady Bird herself. This is a movie that sinks or swims based on how its main character is depicted and how you feel about her; luckily, Ronan displays such charisma as Lady Bird that she is compulsively watchable, even when she briefly turns her back on Julie or gets a little too personal with her mother. Many of the decisions Lady Bird makes are selfish, without much care for those around her, but her feelings of isolation, of feeling different, of wanting to fit in, of desiring the kinds of authentic experiences she reads about in books, they’re all too real to many kids growing up in the heart of suburbia. Life for ambitious kids like Lady Bird is often fueled by melodrama; they’re old enough to have independent thought and strive to be more enlightened than their parents but still young and sheltered enough to not recognize how the world really works. But that melodrama, as seen from a distance, can be absurdly funny, and Gerwig’s script is filled with those beautifully awkward moments, like Lady Bird ducking and rolling out of a moving car after a tense argument with her mother, or melting down after some “unspectacular” sex. As I discussed in my review of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, life is not wholly comedic or dramatic for anyone. Films like Three Billboards, and now Lady Bird, show life for what it is, and that naturally makes you care more about the characters and their experiences, because they just feel so real. The way Gerwig captures the evolving relationships in a person’s life is so powerful that it will inevitably make you consider your own. I expect a lot of meaningful phone calls between children and parents after seeing this.
The spirit of Lady Bird‘s characters is what ultimately what drives its protagonist. In spending so many of her days wanting to escape Sacramento, Lady Bird is also leaving behind so much of what makes her her. It is reminiscent of Adele’s gorgeous ballad “Hometown Glory,” which features the singer looking back fondly upon the people of her hometown, “the wonders of my world.” While she may strive to live a different life far away from Sacramento, Lady Bird is defined by the people she grew up with; they are the wonders of her world. She cannot escape them, and while that fact may temporarily make her feel constricted, they ultimately define who she is, whether she identifies as Lady Bird, or Christine.
★★★★★
FOR YOUR AWARDS CONSIDERATION:
Best Picture
Best Director — Greta Gerwig
Best Actress — Saoirse Ronan
Best Supporting Actor — Tracy Letts
Best Supporting Actress — Laurie Metcalf
Best Original Screenplay — Greta Gerwig
Best Film Editing