Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird has the kind of flaws that most first features have (this is Gerwig’s first solo directing credit). It tends to be representative of its titular protagonist, Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson – strong-willed, vulnerable, occasionally racist. Lady Bird is played by Irish actress Saoirse Ronan, who by all accounts should be as big of a movie star as Jennifer Lawrence, but the fact that she isn’t appears to be of her own choosing, which makes her very young career even that much more intriguing. Gerwig and Ronan’s collaboration in Lady Bird is something beyond good or bad, it’s astonishingly beautiful despite itself. Here we have Gerwig telling a very traditional senior-year-of-high-school-coming-of-age story that feels almost nothing like all the other films in that tradition. It’s a movie that understands the complicated relationships of family, the fucked political/economic landscape of 2002-03, as well as the foundations of Catholic tradition without using them as a crutch in telling its story – it simply knows these details and uses them as context to tell us about Lady Bird McPherson.
Lady Bird’s most important (and most fraught) relationship is with her mother, Marion (an other-worldly Laurie Metcalf). When Christine chose to be called by a name of her choosing, “Lady Bird”, Marion relented, surrendering under the weight of her daughter’s titanic personality. Living in Sacramento, Lady Bird is about to enter her senior year at Immaculate Heart Catholic Academy (Lady Bird derides it as “immaculate fart”), a private institution that her parents placed her in after hearing about violence in the local public school. Marion and Lady Bird’s dad, Larry (Tracy Letts), struggle with money, living in a 25-year-old starter home and the threat of being laid off constantly hanging over Larry’s head. Marion often has to work double shifts at the psychiatric hospital just to keep up appearances. When Larry’s son, Miguel (Jordan Rodrigues), moves in with his girlfriend Shelly (Marielle Scott), things become very tight.
Like most high schoolers, Lady Bird seems completely oblivious to the struggles of her parents. She doesn’t understand that her high-minded, rebellious behavior undercuts the work that Marion does to keep the family together. In school, Lady Bird’s best friend is Julie (Beanie Feldstein), a sweet-hearted good student who is often the softer alternative to Lady Bird’s fierceness. The two talk about boys and masturbating, audition for school plays, and fantasize about life outside of Sacramento. Throughout her senior year, Lady Bird has relationships with two boys. The first is Daniel (Lucas Hedges), a nice, theater-minded Irish Catholic boy with floppy hair and a large, WASP-y family. The second is Kyle (Timothée Chalamet), a Howard Zinn-reading bad boy who plays bass in a band. Neither turn out to be Prince Charming, but the way Lady Bird reveals these disappointments is among the film’s stronger virtues.
Marion’s giant, giving heart often does not have room for Lady Bird’s aloofness. Marion is too busy working and providing to make time to understand her incredibly complicated daughter, and Lady Bird is too busy behaving like a teenager to understand that her parents are reaching a reckoning. Like another film from this year, The Florida Project, Lady Bird has an incredibly poignant understanding of how the most defining moments of your childhood could easily cross-up with the hardest years for your parents. The painful back-and-forth that Marion and Lady Bird enact throughout the film is the movie’s defining aspect. Both people love each other, and yet both could do so much more in understanding one another. If anything, its because of that love that the understanding has such a tough time being reached.
I absolutely adored this movie. Gerwig’s script is so incredibly smart, so filled with particular details that bring this version of Sacramento (of America) to vibrant life. Gerwig is a Sacramento native, and the specifics of this film make it hard not to suppose autobiographical aspects in the story, but Gerwig is smart not to focus on that. As an artist she is both the focal point and also nowhere to be seen. Lady Bird‘s visual style owes some things to her frequent collaborator (and boyfriend) Noah Baumbach, who himself borrows a lot of filming and narrative techniques from Francois Truffaut, and there’s a little bit of Mike Mills’ quaint expressionism as well (luckily she takes NOTHING from her former Mumblecore pals). Form aside, Gerwig’s directing and storytelling is so confident. From the first five minutes, you can see that this is the exact movie she wanted to make. With editor Nick Houy, Gerwig creates a sharp, staccato cutting style that produces lovely vignettes throughout the film. Its a style that, when done wrong, can seem very amateurish. Gerwig does not do it wrong.
The soul of this movie comes down to the performances of Ronan and Metcalf. Ronan is only 23 but let’s remember that she was nominated for her first Oscar ten years ago and has gotten one more nomination since then. Metcalf is a decades-long professional of television and stage. Neither are huge names in the movies, but Lady Bird shows that they should be. Ronan has spent the last few years in roles that play off her classic beauty and the kind of inherent wisdom that American audiences pre-suppose in being Western European. She’s very good in those roles, but Lady Bird gives her something much more meaningful to play. She’s older than seventeen but she still gets the insecurities, the betrayals, the hypnotic compulsion toward coolness that comes with being in high school. Metcalf, on the other hand, has spent a career perfecting this kind of working class performance. Her Marion is generous but judgmental, kind but severe; she’s never willing to let any kind of slight go. Her heartbreak at fighting with her abrasive daughter is our heartbreak as well.
When Lady Bird ended I had this sort of dulled disappointment, and what I realized later in a strange delayed response was that I was sad that the film was over. The film’s conclusion, without bells and whistles, instead portrays one of quietest epiphanies I’ve seen in a movie in a long time. Like a Baumbach movie, Lady Bird does not ask to be liked, but it does ask to be understood; unlike Baumbach, Gerwig does not feel compelled to force her characters into idiosyncratic realms of unlikeability, but that does not mean they’re not rough around the edges. There’s so much to love here and a lot to tear apart. Gerwig has made a film that deserves to rank among John Hughes and Stephen Chbosky’s Perks of Being a Wallflower in its portrayal of adolescent longing and wandering. Gerwig has always been such an indefinable talent for me, hard to pinpoint what she excels at most. It’s always seemed like she was destined for true greatness somewhere and at something. Well, here we are.
Written and Directed by Greta Gerwig