A rewarding true-to-life tale
Director’s story a remarkably specific coming-of-age film with mass appeal
There have been plenty of movies set in the early years of this century, but Lady Bird might qualify as the first 2002 period piece. From a time when Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill was still contemporary rock, when the nearest thing to podcasts were books on tape and not having a cellphone didn’t make you a Luddite, this love letter to a singular time and place casts its line back 15 years and hooks the audience with the details. It’s a truth worth repeating: The more specific you make your comingof-age story, the more universal it becomes.
The star of the picture is Christine (Lady Bird) McPherson, a high-school senior in Sacramento, Calif. And the film’s triumphal writer-director is Greta Gerwig, who — surprise! — was a Sacramento senior herself back in ’02.
So feel free to watch this as autobiography, but know that Gerwig has taken all sorts of liberties. Lady Bird has the ring of truth, but the harmonics of great fiction.
Lady Bird, like many an 18-year-old, can’t wait for life to begin. “I wish I could live through something,” she moans to her mother (Laurie Metcalf ) in the opening scene, and then chucks herself out of the car door during an argument about university. It’s the classic teenaged I’ll-show-you.
Lady Bird (“It’s my given name,” she says. “I gave it to myself.”) has a decent, loving family — though again, she can turn on a dime between defending them and complaining that they don’t understand her. She has a good friend in Julie (Beanie Feldstein), but a secret desire to trade up to wealthy Jenna (Mila Kunis look-alike Odeya Rush). She is smitten first by the allAmerican Danny (Lucas Hedges), then by the more broody Kyle (Timothée Chalamet), particularly after finding Danny with someone else.
So it’s a busy movie, but a very funny one, with Catholic-school references — “Six inches for the Holy Spirit,” the nuns admonish during a dance, gently moving young bodies apart — and enough great performances to stock a sitcom. There’s Stephen
Henderson as the emotional Father Leviatch, whose leave of absence leaves coach Walther (Bob Stephenson) in charge of the school play; unfortunately, he treats it like a football game. Or Jake McDorman as the hot math teacher, whose presence drives Julie into hormonal distress. There’s also just enough gentle wisdom to let you take away something more than your receipt and popcorn bag. When a teacher suggests that Lady Bird loves Sacramento, given the affectionate way she writes about it, the young woman is puzzled. She hates Sacramento, or thinks she does.
When she says she just pays attention, the teacher replies: “Don’t you think they are the same thing? Love and attention?”
She’s right, of course. And Lady Bird will definitely hold your attention.