Saoirse soars to new high as spirited Lady Bird
A terrifically likeable lead role gains Ronan an Oscar nod
ASWEET, funny, charming film about the growing pains of a teenage girl rather bored with her existence in Sacramento, California, and exquisitely played by Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird is nonetheless one of those movies that gain the kind of thunderous praise and awards traction they don’t quite merit.
I liked it, a lot. But fundamentally it is not greatly different from all the other rites-of-passage stories set in provincial American towns, where comedy and poignancy vie for dominance against that oh-so-familiar high school backdrop.
On the other hand, if we were all blessed with having to see only one more, it might as well be the highlyengaging Lady Bird.
Written and directed by the extravagantly-talented Greta Gerwig, and intended as a kind of love-hate letter to her own Sacramento upbringing, it starts arrestingly, with Lady Bird (Ronan) and her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf) soon arguing in a swiftly-moving car.
Suddenly, Lady Bird opens the passenger door and drops out. It’s a lively introduction to her spirited, moody, rebellious, witty nature that is also responsible for her rejecting her more prosaic actual name, Christine.
In many ways, Lady Bird feels like a prequel to Frances Ha, the delightful 2013 comedy Gerwig starred in, and co-wrote with the director (and her partner) Noah Baumbach.
Frances, too, was a lovable ingénue from Sacramento, overwhelmed by life in New York. Lady Bird is Frances one step back, desperate to head east to college.
Until she does she must put up with her nagging, anxious mother, her annoying adopted brother and his livein girlfriend, and the straitened family circumstances, which have worsened since her kindly father (Tracy Letts), her only domestic ally, lost his job.
At her Catholic school, life is even more complicated. Lady Bird has crushes (Timothee Chalamet, an Oscar nominee for his brilliant work in Call Me By Your Name, pops up as one of them), disrespects the Communion wafers and rejects her dumpy best friend (Beanie Feldstein) when a more glamorous girl shows an interest.
In that adolescent way she is funny and confident yet hopelessly insecure, painfully embarrassed by her home on the wrong side of the tracks.
ONE by one the coming-ofage clichés are ticked off. Inevitably, she loses her virginity. Just as inevitably, she picks the wrong boy. But there’s also something unpredictable, even a little subversive, about this film.
It’s nice to find a Catholic school on the silver screen run by nuns who are humane, not homicidal.
Lady Bird could still become bogged down in the dreary familiarity of its setting were it not for a sharp script by Gerwig and a terrifically likeable lead performance by Ronan.
It has propelled her into the running for Best Actress at the Academy Awards, with Metcalf also nominated
for as without ÷No a her mother fewer finely-nuanced being than unable a pain 25 to Bafta in express supporting the and backside. her Oscar turn love nominations Guillermo del underline Toro’s period the need fantasy to see The Shape Of Water but sometimes films can acquire an awards momentum quite out of proportion to their actual quality.
Not this one. I predicted Academy Awards galore as soon as I saw it at the Venice Film Festival last September, and a more recent viewing has reinforced my conviction that The Shape Of Water is the most deserving contender from this year’s impressive clutch of Best Picture nominees.
I also think it’s the Mexican director’s masterpiece, nudging aside even his 2006 triumph Pan’s Labyrinth.
It seems unlikely that its star, Sally Hawkins, will pip Frances McDormand (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) to the Best Actress award next month.
But there should be no argument if she does; it is unequivocally a performance worthy o ever three con an actress’s v trio on Haw Maudie, the and now this
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She plays Elisa, who has been mute since childhood, and communicates not just with sign language but also a raft of wonderfully articulate expressions.
Lots of things make Elisa happy. She loves the movies, loves copying dance steps from the television, and in a platonic way she loves her neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins, also marvellous), an ageing commercial artist whose career, it is hinted, has been derailed by his homosexuality.
Elisa herself is single, but del Toro leaves us in no doubt, with a series of shots of her in the bath, that she is a sensual, sexual being. She works as a cleaner at a government facility in Baltimore, where one day a highly-sensitive ‘asset’ arrives to be housed.
Half-man, half-fish, but wholly monstrous (and played behind layers of fishy prosthetics by Doug Jones), it has been found in the Amazon basin where it was worshipped as a god.
It is then dragged back to the US in the hope that its amphibious powers might be of some use against the Soviets.
It is chained up and kept in a water tank where its captor, a government agent called Strickland (Michael Shannon), treats it brutally.
Indeed, it soon becomes clear that the real monster here is Strickland. He wants the ‘asset’ to be slaughtered and cut open to reveal its anatomical secrets.
But by now, Elisa has bonded with a creature who, like her, lacks the power of speech. She hatches a plan to steal the fish-man, unaware that there is a Soviet spy in the building, planning to do exactly the same thing.
DEL Toro very cleverly keeps all this racing along with the heart-pumping intensity of a Cold War thriller. But it is also an unconventional yet irresistible love story, as well as a meticulous depiction of the era.
Anyone who saw the TV drama Mad Men, for instance, will see in Strickland, as he goes home each night to his loving, materialistic wife and two carefully-groomed children, more than a glimmer of Jon Hamm’s Don Draper.
None of this, however, unfolds at the expense of the story’s wildly fantastical elements, stunningly shot by cinematographer Dan Laustsen who, as a Dane, might appreciate the Hans Christian Andersen flourishes.
There are echoes of King Kong, too, and even more obviously, of the 1954 cult classic Creature From The Black Lagoon — to which del Toro, a film nut since boyhood, is unmistakeably paying homage.
At first I wondered whether this strange, powerful creature might also be a metaphor for the atomic bomb, but if anything it represents the notion (always a welcome impulse in Trump’s America) that we should not rush to judgment on those who look different from ourselves.
When Elisa does finally manage to spirit the creature out of Strickland’s dastardly clutches, one of cinema’s more unusual couplings ensues.
It really is hard to over-state how good Hawkins is in this role. Speech is an actor’s most potent weapon, but she gives a masterclass in how to move and charm an audience without it.
Of course, she also gets superb support. Shannon, such a charismatic performer, is as brilliant as ever as the cruel Strickland.
The always-reliable Octavia Spencer is terrific, too, as Elisa’s trusted workmate, Zelda. And Jenkins richly deserves his Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor.
But in the highly unlikely event of The Shape Of Water winning only a brace of Academy Awards, I hope it is for Best Director and Best Picture.