Lady Bird takes flight with best
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Timothée Chalamet, Lucas Hedges, Tracy Letts Before life can start moving, she must stop and grow
LET the record show we are currently embedded in the richest vein of quality movies on offer for well over a decade.
Make sure you get along to Lady Bird, one of the most graceful, funny, alert and alive coming-of-age pictures you will ever see. It goes without saying it is a lock for one of the best movies of 2018.
“I wish I could live through something,” 17-year-old Christine McPherson (played by the incomparable Saoirse Ronan) says on the eve of her final year of high school.
Make no mistake, her wish will be granted by film’s end.
And you will be living it along with “Lady Bird”, the name Christine prefers to be called by everyone she meets.
Those inverted commas are deliberate, by the way. That’s how Christine “Lady Bird” Johnson writes it (like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson).
Yes, Lady Bird is a real character. However, being one of a kind isn’t doing her any favours in her dreary home town of Sacramento.
This bastion of Californian conformity feels like a conspiratorial practical joke against Lady Bird, and her ambition to be accepted into a fancy college on the other side of the country.
There is her ferociously fractious relationship with her perpetually exhausted and dissatisfied mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf).
In their first scene together, a blissful session listening to an audiobook suddenly escalates into a bitter argument, which ends with Lady Bird leaving via the nearest exit. I should mention they have this disagreement in a car travelling just under the speed limit.
Later, Lady Bird finds herself drifting further into that cavernous unmarked territory between cool and uncool at her rigorously Catholic high school.
There will be a so-right-itjust-has-to-go-wrong romance with one boy (Lucas Hedges), and a polar-opposite dalliance with another (Timothée Chalamet, star of the sublime Call Me By Your Name).
I could go on and on about the love of clever conversation this film sincerely promotes, its rare ability to pull a moment of palpable poignancy out of thin air, the magnificent performances of Ronan and Metcalf, and the miraculous writing and direction of Greta Gerwig.
But I won’t. For you’ll find yourself doing that anyway once Lady Bird has taken flight before you.
LADY BIRD SCREENS IN ADVANCE PREVIEWS UNTIL TOMORROW, THEN OPENS IN FULL RELEASE ON THURSDAY