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Lady Bird

Aymen Saqib
Nov 26, 2017
3 min read

Rating 9/10

Directed by Greta Gerwig

Starring

Saoirse Ronan as Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson

Laurie Metcalf as Marion McPherson

Tracy Letts as Larry McPherson

Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s endearing coming-of-age portrait, far from cliché. It achieved a rare and coveted 100% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, surpassing (at the time of writing) big-budget blockbuster Toy Story 2 (1999), which also had a 100% rating but from slightly fewer critics.

For Greta Gerwig’s first solo effort behind the camera, she draws from personal history. Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson is an intelligent but disenchanted high school senior, growing up in Sacramento in the early 2000s. She lives on “the wrong side of the tracks,” with a nurse mother, an out-of-work father, her slacker brother, and his girlfriend. She attends Immaculate Heart Catholic school. She longs to escape. “I hate California, I want to go to the east coast. I want to go where culture is like, New York, or Connecticut, or New Hampshire,” she muses.

Gerwig admits that her inspiration is autobiographical, but claims to have had little in common with her lead character. In an interview with IMDB, she laughingly asserted that “I had nothing embarrassing happen to me in high school. I’m the only person in the world [who didn’t]. Everybody liked me and I never made a mistake … that’s why I had to make this all up.”

As idyllic as Gerwig’s own youth may (or, apparently, may not) have been, the fictitious Lady Bird has issues. The teen as square-peg-in-a-round-hole set-up has been leveraged by Hollywood for decades, as anyone who has ever sat through a John Hughes film will attest. Like other high school heroines before her, Lady Bird struggles with insecurity, ambition, self-esteem, and the opposite sex. But Gerwig has achieved the near-impossible; she has created a delicious young character whose situation is at once completely familiar and uniquely unusual.

Aside from her terrific screenwriting and sensitive direction, Gerwig is aided by a remarkable performance twenty-three year old Saoirse Ronan, who has already received two Oscar nominations. In fact, earlier this week it was announced that Lady Bird, its screenplay, Ronan and her costar Laurie Metcalf are all in the running for a 2018 Golden Globe.

Metcalf plays Lady Bird’s mother, Marion. The tempestuous scenes between mother and daughter are absurd but heartbreaking. There are moments when the bond between them is so strong it shines, like when they find the perfect dress at the local thrift shop. Other times Impossibly hurtful things are not just said but hurled across the room or the car’s front seat like a weapon of maternal destruction. However, when her first fumbling boyfriend Danny (Lucas Hedges) suggests, “Your mom’s really hard on you,” Lady Bird shrugs. “Well, she loves me a lot.”

Lady Bird’s father has a special bond with her but honestly, they’re both a little scared of Marion. Like so much of the film, Gerwig doesn’t make him a stock character. He has his own terribly real challenges, like trying to convince a smug millennial to hire him.

The compassion Gerwig feels for all her characters is at the very heart of Lady Bird. Marion could be a monster, but she isn’t. Larry is beaten down but remains optimistic. Their son with multiple piercings and matching check-out jobs fast become three-dimensional. Even the standard characters you find in most high school movies (the best friend, the mean girl, the guy who’s too cool for school, the hunky teacher) are less cartoonish than they might be. Part of Lady Bird is thinking you know where a scene is going and being pleasantly surprised when it changes course.