On the verge of adulthood, 17-year-old Sacramento native Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson confronts the slow dawning of reality.
USA
4*
Director:
Greta Gerwig
Screenwriter:
Greta Gerwig
Director of Photography:
Sam Levy
Running time: 95 minutes
Widely praised for its sensitive handling of a teenager’s coming of age, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird is at its best when it advances our understanding of the titular main character’s parents – in particular, her hot-blooded but sometimes icily passive-aggressive mother, Marion (a stunning portrayal by Laurie Metcalf). Unusually, we gain a compassionate understanding of parents as people who, just like their children, are a volatile mixture of emotions and motivations.
“Lady Bird” (Saoirse Ronan), a name the 17-year-old Christine McPherson has recently adopted as part of a phase of rebelliousness that her mother looks upon with disdain, is growing restless with life in Sacramento, which she describes, with as much love as hate, as the “Midwest of California”. She wants to move far away for college, preferably the East Coast, where the Twin Towers had come down nearly a year earlier. But Marion’s continual insinuation that her daughter is too immature to cope with life on her own leads to many a bout of screaming, as well as a broken arm, with no clear winner.
The ups and downs of Lady Bird’s final year of high school include not only the boom and bust of losing her virginity and unexpected revelations about her love interest’s sexual awakening but also the consequences of her lies, well-intentioned though they might be.
The high school in question is Immaculate Heart, a co-ed Catholic school run by good-natured nuns who both provide spiritual guidance and make hilarious attempts at discipline (at the prom, one of them tells a couple they should dance six inches apart… “for the Holy Spirit!”). Lady Bird runs a very unconventional campaign for class president, and she and her best friend, Julie, snack on communion wafers when no one is watching. Then, one day, she signs up for the school play, and everything changes.
She meets angel-faced Danny (Lucas Hedges in a role that is the polar opposite of his turn in Manchester by the Sea), who plays the lead, and this meeting leads to a relationship that gives her an opportunity to enlarge her social network, which eventually includes the wealthiest and the weirdest characters around, like Kyle (Timothée Chalamet), the black-haired, porcelain-complexioned quasi-intellectual but cute-as-a-button loner.
Lady Bird’s laugh-out-loud comedy is tightly wound to its insightful and always empathetic glimpses of the jitters just below the surface, as when Lady Bird’s parents find out she tells her friends she comes from the wrong side of the tracks, or when her father and brother meet accidentally while applying for the same job. But nothing comes close to the outwardly straightforward but emotionally intricate screenwriting gem that is the scene at a department store’s changing rooms, where Lady Bird is trying on a dress for prom:
LADY BIRD: I love it.
MARION: (unsure) Is it too pink? (beat) What?
LADY BIRD: Why can’t you say I look nice?
MARION: I thought you didn’t even care what I think.
LADY BIRD: I still want you to think I look good.
MARION: OK. I’m sorry, I was telling you the truth. You want me to lie?
LADY BIRD: No, I just wish… I just… I wish that you liked me.
MARION: Of course I love you.
LADY BIRD: But do you like me?
MARION: (hesitates) I want you to be the very best version of yourself that you can be.
LADY BIRD: What if this is the best version?
This absolutely heartrending interaction – in a public space, no less – is simple but saturated with tension. Both mother and daughter face disappointment while simultaneously digging deep to be honest without hurting each other. They want to be independent but they also want to be accepted. They want to be themselves but don’t want to fall short of the other’s expectations of them. In other words, they accurately reflect flesh-and-blood human beings. And this depth is evident in many of the characters, including Lady Bird’s soft-spoken but ever-supporting father (played by Tracy Letts), her older brother, Miguel (Jordan Rodrigues), and the latter’s girlfriend, Shelly (Marielle Scott). Miguel and Shelly’s studded faces belie their sensitivity over their own marginalisation, but the more they speak, despite their small roles, the more they creep into our hearts.
And yet, while the film makes a point of being situated in a rarely depicted locale (Sacramento) in an unusual year (the relatively recent 2002, which is just long enough ago for the music to sound both old and immediately recognisable and the fashion to look ridiculous because it’s dated but not yet retro), it doesn’t make much of its context: It’s good that Sactown gets some love, but we rarely get to see more than the Tower Bridge. And there is no obvious reason why the story is better told in 2002 than in 2016 or 2017, except that flip phones, which are all the rage on this timeline, now just look quaint. One giant blunder is the film’s soundtrack, which is ludicrously packed with “Best of…” tracks from 2002. There is no reason to remind us so aggressively that the film is set in that particular year. It’s not important – this is not American Graffiti.
Luckily, Gerwig’s direction is flawless, and so is her sense of rhythm: She lets her camera take in an entire emotional realisation, for example, when Lady Bird realises Kyle has lied to her and goes from loving and cuddly to crestfallen, in an unbroken take. But she also recognises the value of cinematic synecdoche, as when one entire scene consists of a very brief shot, not even three seconds long, showing Lady Bird’s toe curled in the bathtub, which we can safely assume indicates a level of self-pleasuring that is self-evident in the context but does not need to be made any more explicit.
Anchored by Ronan’s and Metcalf’s superb performances as flawed but benevolent individuals, Lady Bird is an affectionate portrait of life as a senior whose goal is opaque and whose strategy for reaching it is never much more than a draft – a Plan A without a Plan B. The film is immanently watchable because it brims with optimism while never minimising the stumbles along the way. We get to see rare moments of joy shared by mother and daughter, even as they seem to be fighting non-stop throughout the story, and in the process, we are reminded that parents are people, and that life’s lessons only end when we die.