Movie audiences have recently gotten a number of great
coming-of-age stories, and now “Lady Bird” takes a place at the top of that
heap, delivering an unfailingly honest, hilarious, and warm-hearted depiction
of growing up in California in the early aughts.
Making her solo directing debut, actor Greta Gerwig
tells the story of Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), a Catholic high school
senior in Sacramento, circa-2002.
Christine,
who prefers to go by her “given name” of “Lady Bird” (“I gave it to myself, it
was given to me by me”), lives in a modest home with her mother, Marion (Laurie
Metcalf); her recently laid-off father (Tracy Letts); and her brother, Miguel
(Jordan Rodrigues), and his girlfriend, Shelly (Marielle Scott). It’s the kind
of house her parents had always assumed they’d upgrade at some point, but have
never quite been able to afford. Lady Bird can’t help but look at her
classmates’ mini-mansions with envious eyes, as her family’s financial strain
has subtly colored the way she views the rest of the world.
As high
school comes to an end, Lady Bird is faced with choosing a college and deciding
what she wants to do with her future. She’s unsure what that entails, but
positive it requires getting as far from her hometown as possible. Over the
course of the year, Lady Bird has experiences that check all the boxes we
expect from a teen film: prom night, the first fumbling explorations of sex, growing
apart from her best friend (the fantastic Beanie Feldstein) to try her hand at
hanging with a cooler crowd.
She even
finds two potential love interests: enthusiastic, sensitive theater kid Danny
(Lucas Hedges), and the too-cool-for-school bad boy Kyle (a pitch-perfect TimothรฉeChalamet). Despite their
familiarity, these situations are imbued with enough truth that they never feel
less than achingly real.
At the true
heart of the film is the prickly relationship between Lady Bird and Marion,
both strong-willed, stubborn women who can’t help but be at odds with one
another. As you might expect from an actor-turned-director, Gerwig
gets some fantastic performances from her cast. Ronan demonstrates once again
that there’s nothing she can’t do, and she gives Lady Bird’s clumsy attempts at
expressing herself an endearing quality no matter how selfish she’s being. Her
mother is every bit as complicated, and Metcalf is extraordinary in the role.
As a writer
and director, Gerwig has a clear affection for her
characters, investing them with a rich inner life. Her script is filled with
hilarious, sharply-written, and carefully observed details — she even finds an
unexpected poignancy in Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash Into Me.”
Capturing
the feeling of being desperate to leave home and get on with “real” life, “Lady
Bird” is both a delightful portrait of youth and a loving tribute to Sacramento
(like her main character, Gerwig grew up and went to
a Catholic high school in California’s capital city). Smart, funny, and deeply
heartfelt, it’s one of my favorite films of the year.
This article appears in Nov 15-21, 2017.
