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.