Next stop, the Oscars... and the female comedy to watch
Despite the Golden Globes’ night of protest against gender inequality being hailed as progress, Natalie Portman’s pointed remarks on the “all-male” nominees for Best Director demonstrated how far Hollywood still has to go. To wit, the director of one of this award’s season’s most talked-about films went unrecognised.
But 34-year-old writer-director Greta Gerwig’s filmmaking debut, Lady Bird, did collect awards for Best Comedy/musical, and Best Actress for its 23-year-old lead Saoirse Ronan – and is one of the hot favourites for Best Picture at the Academy Awards next month. It is also the great hope of an awards season focused on addressing Hollywood’s power imbalance – a heavy load for a thoughtful teenage comedy. Set in 2002, Lady Bird follows “Lady Bird” (the riveting Ronan), a 17-year-old girl from California, who has stringy pink hair and grungy clothes, and obsesses over leaving Sacramento for an expensive east coast liberal arts college. Her parents can’t afford it, and she has no idea what she’ll study, nor much academic prowess; just a fierce sense of her own potential.
At its heart is her domestic warfare with her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf), who maintains a brutally pragmatic view of her averagely talented daughter’s prospects. Coming-of-age films are as common as regrettable tattoos, yet few have struck such a chord as this.
Should Lady Bird win the top prize at the Oscars, it would be only the second film directed by a woman to do so, following Kathryn Bigelow’s 2010 triumph for Iraq war movie The Hurt Locker. Coincidentally, both films take place in the same era: Lady Bird is often belly-down in front of TV coverage of the war. But Gerwig reminds us that we’ve mostly seen the period refracted through the prism of conflict, and trains her focus on smaller domestic battles, the kind that play out in homes across the world every day.
Her ability to spotlight the torrid undercurrent of love powering these contretemps is what gives her film its magic; and her focus on specifically female experience is what makes this the most quietly important awards contender in this watershed year. Laura Snapes