Lady Bird (2017)
A review of Lady Bird (2017), directed by Greta Gerwig
I remember when Lady Bird came out. I was a senior at an arts high school in Baltimore, somewhere in suburbia, and everyone, from the artists to the writers, were raving about relating to Lady Bird’s plight.
We were all kids from outside Baltimore, what seemed to be a doomed city, and we wanted to go bigger. To be successful artists in New York City or Los Angeles, appearing on Broadway hit after Broadway hit. And for me, a depressed seventeen-year-old writer, it seemed like I was Lady Bird.
One of my biggest complaints as someone who tends to cover girlhood and coming-of-age stories is that when young girls are depicted, they are often either sexualized (e.g. the Hollywood movies where our protagonist is a teenage boy lusting after his classmates, the dumb blonde who has her boobs spilling out of her shirt, etc.) or depicted in a manner that seems inauthentic to most women nowadays.
We are separating ourselves from our realities and the realities depicted on the screen; this was the first movie that I saw that took these two parallel worlds and made them seem very real.
Let’s begin this review, shall we?
The year is 2002 and young Christine McPherson, aka Lady Bird, just wants to get out of boring Sacramento.
Almost immediately, we are doused fully with the personality of our main heroine. She goes to a private Catholic school, but doesn’t really seem to belong there. Christine has rebranded herself under the moniker of Lady Bird, steals magazines at the local grocery store her brother works at, and absolutely longs to move out to the East Coast for college, as she believes there is no culture on the West Coast.
The standout performance in this entire movie is Saoirse Ronan as Lady Bird, with the actor playing her mother coming in a close second. Ronan is absolutely marvelous in this film; she whines, rebels, and conjures up a few angry tears in the perfect way we’d imagine a teenager like Lady Bird to do.
There’s a lot of smaller threads moving this story along, which is what makes it so much more realistic. After Lady Bird and her best friend join the school’s theatre club, she gets a crush on Lucas Hedges’ character, Danny, who seems to have the life that Lady Bird wants.
His family doesn’t fight at the Thanksgiving table and they have a nice big house with a large front yard. And, in a way, a big part of this movie is the fact that Lady Bird doesn’t actually know what she wants.
She thinks that if she dates Danny, who ends up being the stereotypical gay theatre kid, she’ll be one step closer to becoming cultured and stepping away from her bad situation at home.
Her family’s finances aren’t the best because her dad lost his job, and her mom, a nurse, works very hard to keep Lady Bird at her private school. They don’t even think they can afford the college applications or even the tuition to send Lady Bird across the country.
Lady Bird then befriends Jenna, a snobby rich girl, by lying to her about who she was. She pretends that she lives at Danny’s home and can keep up with the wealthier girls at her school, but she can’t. This then leads her to Kyle (Timothee Chalamet), who is a pseudo-intellectual. He delivers lines about how the phones are tracking devices (he isn’t wrong, let’s be real), and that chipping humans is next.
But, at the end of the day, he’s also a douche that lies about being a virgin. These characters are meant to be the reverse of the world that LB wants to live in; Kyle seems like the cultured man that desires to find on the East Coast, but in reality he’s just kind of full of shit.
The biggest part of this movie, however, is the fact that Lady Bird rejects everything that her mother has done for her. We see these tender moments between the two, such as shopping for the prom dress, but LB doesn’t seem to realize the significance of how much exactly her mother has done.
LB is so focused, in a quite selfish manner that’s quite reminiscent of the attitude of youths in general, on getting out of Sacramento that she doesn’t see the finer details. She’s narrowed in on this thought process that this place sucks and needs to be changed, thus not allowing her to appreciate what she actually does have.
It isn’t until LB is at that dream New York college on the East Coast and is hospitalized in a classic college move—she nearly drinks herself to death at a party—that she goes to a church, like the school she went to, and realizes what she has done.
LB has finally grown up a little, allowing her the chance at self-redemption by calling her mother. I think that this is the perfect note to end the movie on, because it leaves at a divergence of two pathways.
One in which they fail to rekindle their relationship, or one in which they become best friends.
Overall Thoughts
This is a good movie because it hits on so many different notes; the relationship between mother and daughter, being a tumultuous girl growing up in suburbia, trying to find your identity when it feels like you’re stuck in life, whether it’s emotionally or physically.
We also get hints of the time; LB’s brother, Miguel, went to UC Berkeley and has been unemployed for awhile. Their father, too, has been unemployed and is actually depressed. We see Danny, the little Catholic theatre boy, struggling with his identity and being the secret odd one out in his perfect family dynamic.
Kyle and Jenna are just lost in their own weird little worlds. Each and every one of these characters is fleshed out in a way that makes them fairly realistic, which is what makes this movie so charming for the viewers.
