Lady Bird Soars

Movie Reviewed: Lady Bird

Director: Greta Gerwig

Date: 6 January 2018

jamesintexas rating: ****




Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird is a triumph of cinematic storytelling and emotion.  With its fully realized and complex performances by Saoirse Ronan as the eponymous heroine and the great Laurie Metcalf as her mother, Marion McPherson, Lady Bird confronts class and place in very moving and specific ways, as well as relationships that we surround ourselves with and what we chose for ourselves.  I'm writing this the day after the Academy Award nominations came out, where there was much love for this film, and yet it does not even seem like enough admiration.  From its casting to its narrative decisions, Lady Bird emerges fully formed and wondrous, and I'm sure that it offers more on its second and third viewings.

Coming of age stories are rarely this nuanced, eschewing the hyperbolic and the gags, and that's a credit to the creative force of Greta Gerwig.  The self-anointed Lady Bird ("It is my given name; I gave it to myself") feels constrained by her life in Sacramento, what she calls the Midwest of California, and shuttles from her warm Catholic High School to her complex relationship with her mom.  She has a close friend in Julie (Beanie Feldstein), and when they both sign up for Drama Club, a sort of chain reaction occurs that leads to different layers, different friends.  Her teachers are foils but also fully realized people with their own agendas and aches.  Her relationships with her brother, his girlfriend, and her father also work themselves into her senior year in poignant and surprising ways.  And, as always, there is college looming and Lady Bird's sense of possibility in herself as a writer and what that means.

To reveal more would be a sin, but rest assured, there are secrets and surprises, quiet epiphanies and heartbreaks, as well as an airport sequence fraught with intense, reserved emotion that comes spilling out over the great Laurie Metcalf's face.  The final chapter of the film is both elegiac and profoundly hopeful in the best possible way; I never knew where the film would take us.  It is also deeply, deeply funny.

Part of the reason that I hope you read this blog is that you are a family member or friend or classmate or student of mine at some point in the many chapters of my life.  Facebook is a constant barrage and collision of those chapters, and it is jarring to see people from my time at YES Prep (where I work now) in the same timeline as people that have known me since first grade at Immaculate Conception Grade School.  Walt Whitman's line is that "We contain multitudes" as a signal on the contradictory nature of us as Americans, as humans.  To say Lady Bird contains multitudes is an understatement. But returning to the reason I hope you read...   Part of the reason that I hope you read this blog is to see something that even with some Oscar recognition and accolades on year-end polls or Rotten Tomatoes still has a much smaller chance of being seen and appreciated, especially when juxtaposed against the Top Grossing Films of 2017, a panoply of special effects, comic book madness, and sequel maintenance (with apologies to Wonder Woman, the rare film that offers style, substance, fun, and emotion).  No matter where you are in your journey with film or what chapter of your life you find yourself, Lady Bird should be seen and appreciated.  To be age 39 and reviewing films means to see a character like Marion McPherson anew, with fresh sympathy and empathy for all that occurs, whereas an earlier version of me would fixate on the main character exclusively.  It is a startling treat about getting older that time and life experience shifts whom you connect with in a film.  My son is four; my daughter, two.  I have no idea what the teenage versions of themselves will be like.  Lady Bird states to her mom, "What if this is the best version of me that I can be?" to a perfectly wry look from Laurie Metcalf that captures her mom's loving disbelief and exasperation at her daughter's emerging public identity.  The quiet moments at the end of the film are more abstract and less expected, but as someone who has emerged and grown in large part away from both of my parents since leaving home at seventeen for college, it was undeniably powerful.

I hope that you take this review as a call to action: Gerwig's voice cannot be denied, and Ronan especially continues to dazzle, even after great performances in films like Atonement, Brooklyn, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.  I am so thankful that I will get to watch her career unfold.  Recommendations are tricky, but I stand by this one.  Lady Bird is among the best films of the year, maybe the best.  See it.

Well, here we are: Star Wars Episode Eight, The Divergence of the Force by The Mouse.

Movie Reviewed: Star Wars Episode Eight: The Last Jedi

Director: Rian Johnson

Date: 6 January 2018

jamesintexas rating: **



Failure is always an option, and I think The Last Jedi represents a failure of ideas at times despite its many wonders.  "The greatest teacher, failure is" says you know who in an appearance applauded for its puppetry and lack of CGI but another example of pillaging the past.  (Side note: Hasn't this character been through enough when I think of the Sonic-the-Hedgehog type stunts in Episode 2?)  I am also not sure if the creative forces behind this film and the aggressive release schedule which drives forward stories so quickly would align with the master's idea of learning from a failure.  A failure that makes one billion dollars in box office in only a few weeks.  I think that as a long-time fan, I am coming to terms with the world being a place where a new Star Wars film happens yearly and is just less special.  That is what it is.

The Last Jedi.  Even the title to this film lacks conviction and clarity because I do not know who it is supposed to refer to and what it means.  Rian Johnson's bloated, overstuffed take on the Star Wars universe stumbles in its own mythology, seems to mishandle the great Carrie Fisher's last onscreen performance as General Leia (unless maybe there is footage for Episode Nine?), juggles multiple story lines poorly, gives short shrift to characters like Rey and Finn as well as substance in order to fit in multiple CGI cute creatures and quasi-political and social commentary about arms dealing and weapon-building, and ultimately the film embodies the worst tendencies of Peter Jackson's finale in The Lord of The Rings: The Return of The King, with an overlong, extended, indulgent denouement.  Here, Johnson flirts with making bold, radical choices with this storytelling and always blinks, never being courageous enough to shock or stir the audience.  In contrast, he is much more comfortable blowing up the tenets of the Jedi world, including the laws that govern them and the Force-ghosts in ways that provide quick storytelling shortcuts but up-end the universe itself without making sense.  And don't get me started on the jump to Hyperspace.

This film is a curiosity: a storyteller's decision to play in the world and muck it up, which I guess is his right, as this new trilogy is significantly farther away from George Lucas's vision than The Force Awakens would have made us believe.  In that film, J. J. Abrams offered a mishmash of old recycled into new, charmingly playing in the destruction of the world of the original trilogy with exciting, fresh characters like Rey and Finn and even Kylo Ren.  My favorite moments included Rey scavenging in the wrecked carcass of a Star Destroyer, now smashed up on the floor of her planet.  Now, the world constructed in The Last Jedi seems constrained by its script, in a rush to go here and there, while being a bit of a tale of sound and fury, as it were.  Many ridiculed George Lucas's focus on trade federations in Episode One; now, we have an entire movie devoted to running out of fuel?

After an exciting, WW2-esque opening battle, there are too many storylines to follow: Kylo Ren's (Adam Driver) dark journey and then rage; General Hux's (Domhnall Gleeson) grandstanding; the unconvincing bad guy Snoke (Andy Serkis); Finn (John Boyega) and Rose's (Kelly Marie Tran) journey to another planet and back to gather secrets to help their failing ship; sidelined flyboy Poe (Oscar Isaac) clashing with autocratic Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern); Rey (Daisy Ridley) following Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) around until he agrees to teach her; and I think that's it?  There is an early fake-out death which goes far beyond the logic of this established universe and feels like a take from a Superman film.  I think that moment took me out of the film, and I struggled to get back on board.  It was distracting and still does not make sense to me.

To say this film signifies nothing is not true.  But whatever Johnson's vision is for this world, I am not sure I want in after this because there is some really strange altering of the world as we know it which offers some great visuals but sacrifices something in the process.  Johnson displays clumsiness and an unsteady hand throughout, which is evidenced by the film's inability to end.  The overlong quality of this movie betrays its own insecurities: Johnson wants to give us everything and nothing at the same time.  Rey engages in an Empire Strikes Back-ish quest to learn from Luke as teased in the closing moments of the previous film.  Luke's reluctance to join The Resistance and become her teacher are the most compelling moments of the film.  When the film is at its best, Skywalker storms around a rainy Ireland island in a cloak with Rey following and trying to engage him while also undergoing her own self-discovery.  Rey begins to psychically connect with Kylo Ren through Force telepathy, and her thoughts are never far away from her origin story.  Who are her parents?  What is her destiny?  How does she negotiate The Force and her newfound power?  Those are my favorite moments, and the more Rey, the better.  Rey and Finn are kept strategically apart this film, and I think that's a mistake because of the chemistry between the two characters, and dramatically, I think I just wanted more of Rey, though she does have a wonderful action sequence mid-film that repairs a missed opportunity in The Return of The Jedi.

As the latest two Star Wars films have proven, you show me an AT-AT, I'm probably on board because of nostalgia and the Hoth Battle being maybe my favorite moments in the series, close second being the forty minutes in Jabba's palace.  And there is a nice apocalyptic quality of some of the final sequence with its stark imagery, snow-like salt on top of red, blazing with light shimmering everywhere, but the final machinations of the film left me nonplussed, about which the less said, the better.  I was emotional in the final scenes, but I also think that part of that emotion was because the film seems to have sidelined its most interesting characters in plot lines that do not allow them to shine.  Ridley and Boyega are so fun to watch; they deserve to do more than just wait around.  Hamill does what he can with a Luke Skywalker that has been given this story line.  The performances generally are strong; I think I just was troubled by the arrangement of the film and storytelling, and some of dialogue is very clunky, even by Lucasian standards.

"We are what they grow beyond" says the green sage.  Growth, I guess, is debatable.