Lady Bird
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SAOIRSE RONAN
LAURIE METCALF
TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET
Marion McPherson: I want you to be the very best version of yourself that you can be.
Lady Bird: What if this is the best version?
Quick fox: A | Silver
Lady Bird is a brilliant coming-of-age dramatic comedy for modern times, with an amazing ensemble cast and a refreshing style that is built to last for generations.
winding dragon
Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) can’t wait to get out of Sacramento. She hates California. She hates her Catholic high school. She hates her parents’ poverty and that they’re from the “wrong side of the tracks” (literally and figuratively — they live near train tracks). She hates her given name so she makes up a name for herself. She hates that her high school graduation year is 2002 because the only exciting thing about 2002 is the number is a palindrome. Yes, Lady Bird hates a lot of things and isn’t afraid to let everyone know it…which is strange for someone with so much energy and capacity for love. But that’s the perils of being a high school senior. She’s a fearless risk-taker when it comes to her emotions, leading her into some pretty nasty conflicts with her equally stubborn mother (Laurie Metcalf), especially when it comes to family finances and college opportunities. Ugly arguments turn harsher when Lady Bird enlists her depressed father (Tracy Letts) into helping her keep her East Coast college applications a secret. But Lady Bird’s strong convictions are also what push her into the throes of young romance — first with Danny (Lucas Hedges) and next with Kyle (Timothée Chalamet). It’s what binds her to her friendship with Julie (Beanie Feldstein) and appreciates performing in the school’s musical under the guidance of Father Leviatch (Stephen McKinley Henderson). As the school year passes by all too quickly, Lady Bird grows an appreciation for her roots, realizing almost too late that it is the city and its inhabitants that has shaped her into the woman she has become.
I struggled with sharing a review for Lady Bird, rewriting it something like a dozen times. Anyone who has ever had a chance to edit my writing probably thinks that’s pretty on par for the course, but I knew that this time felt different. As I pulled a Rafiki and looked harder into the watery depths of my soul (that weird analogy also made me think of Hercules diving into the Styx to save Meg — bless my soul Herc needs to save me from this spiraling stream of consciousness), the irony hit me: I was writing a film review about a (relatively) small town character (she does live in Sacramento!) moving to a big city at the same time literally days removed moving from a small town to Chicago.
… And that’s when I noticed how many elements in Lady Bird felt eerily similar to my own life. Not the actual events — more like how the angsty tone and overall awkwardly funny anxiety I had watching the film are almost indistinguishable from my own experiences moving to Chicago. If I become rich and famous enough, maybe I’ll write my own screenplay about my personal coming-of-age moment trying to move to the Windy City (and believe me when I say there was plenty of drama), but that’s when I also realized that maybe I was a bit too close to the subject material to be realistically objective. So I made a compromise with myself: Lady Bird will not be graded. Not until a later time, at least. Instead, I responded to the three most common reactions to Lady Bird I’ve seen on sites like IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes, and left those to stand on their own.
Lady Bird is different from other coming-of-age films.
Lady Bird is unique because it is not about romantic relationships. Many coming-of-age films with female protagonists steer their leading lady into the arms of a charming bachelor. (Classic examples: Sixteen Candles, Legally Blonde, Clueless.) And though Lady Bird has fleeting relationships with Danny and Kyle, respectively, they’re treated as just that: fleeting. The most important relationships in her life (daughter, father, best friend) are given time to grow, which is something I really appreciated. Easily the most dynamic relationship is between Lady Bird and her mother Marion McPherson. The opening scene sets the table for their tense relationship — a shock laugh (though not so much if you’ve seen the trailer) where Lady Bird jumps out of her mother’s moving vehicle in a halfway successful power move to end a bitter conversation about college applications. The stage direction in the script literally reads:
“They slow for a stop light and Lady Bird dramatically opens the door and rolls out of the car.
Marion screams.”
The next shot is Lady Bird’s arm wrapped in a pink cast and a close-up of very tiny letters in Lady Bird’s handwriting, “f*** you, Mom.” What that cast says about her personality is that she’s a vibrant person (like her neon pink cast), who harbors enough resentment/angst that she wants to show it off to the world — but not enough to incur the wrath of her mother lest Marion reads the tiny lettering.
But at the end of the day, the main message Lady Bird has to tell us is that love and attention are interchangeable. What Lady Bird sees as her mother’s disappointment or anger is sometimes a case of skewed perspective; it can also read as her mother’s attention to making Lady Bird understand some of the harsher realities the rebellious teenager doesn’t want to admit. One of the more pointed life lessons comes with driving to school — Lady Bird always makes her father drop her off a block or two away from the high school because she’s embarrassed for her classmates to see her father and their family car. Later in the story, Marion confronts Lady Bird about her total disregard for her father’s feelings, and it’s something Lady Bird never realized she was doing to her father. Some coming-of-age dramas like to completely remove parenthood from the protagonist’s life, but Lady Bird embraces parents as a natural part of maturation.
Lady Bird is philosophical… sentimental… but most of all, it’s damn funny.
If you like sarcasm and savage insults, then you will fall in love with Lady Bird. Director and screenwriter Greta Gerwig does a fabulous job of crafting every element to reflect Lady Bird’s personality, which is best summed up as an abrasive, witty teenager who wants to be an adult without understanding all the pitfalls of becoming one. Saoirse Ronan delivers the performance of her career up until now, perfectly switching Lady Bird’s various personas to match whatever her relationship to another character calls for.
The big theme — love = attention — which causes Lady Bird no shortage of misery, especially with her mother often giving Lady Bird more attention (both positive and critical) than she wants. Much of the humor is from this unwanted attention, like Lady Bird and her mother not seeing eye-to-eye on boyfriends or college prom dress shopping. Even though they fight a lot, Lady Bird and her mother have matching personalities, so it creates some very funny conversational twists to see them snap from archenemies to best friends in a matter of seconds.
The way Lady Bird is shot is often how I feel about talking to people at parties — as if I’m interrupting a private conversation. The cinematography is up close and personal, capturing characters’ reactions to dialogue spoken off-camera; scenes always begin during the middle of a conversation so that we have to catch up to the action. This creates a blend of beautifully “random” moments, and forcing the audience to make snap judgments about characters without knowing the full picture and feeling a little bit outside the loop (kind of like my socially awkward personality). But the miscommunication-based humor feels very true to life, and I definitely enjoyed the quirkier scenes, like Lady Bird and Julie eating communion wafers like potato chips in the back room of their Catholic Church. (Don’t worry, they weren’t blessed yet.)
Lady Bird was considered by critics to be one of the most “relatable” movies of the 2010s.
I mean, I guess a cynical person could say, simply replace the 90-minutes of Lady Bird with Ed Sheeran's 4-minute song “Castle on the Hill” and you’d get the same sentimental message about appreciating the places and people who’ve shaped you. I do agree that this film does lose a little bit of its flavor without some of the key connections: strained mother-daughter relationship, rules and regulations of a Roman Catholic upbringing, restlessness living in a relatively quiet suburban neighborhood, expressing teenage rebellion through outrageous proclamations and hair color choices, high-school cliques, young love = heartbreak, joining your school’s drama department on a whim … If you’ve never experienced any of these then you’re not going to have the same attachment to Lady Bird. (And yes, full disclosure, I have personally experienced some of those items on the list.) But Lady Bird just has a natural gift for appealing to a large group of people. It recreates the experience of setting out on your own for the first time in a way that I’ve never seen before, and does it with such a refreshing sense of humor.