Heartfelt coming-of-age story masters the details
Two years ago, in the luminous coming-of-age film “Brooklyn,” I wondered whether we’d seen Saoirse Ronan in her final turn in a teenage role.
Thank goodness writer/ director Greta Gerwig (better known as an actor — in “Maggie’s Plan” and “Frances Ha,” among others) talked her into doing one more.
“Lady Bird” is a joy, from its start (in which a teenager and her mother sleep face to face on a hotel bed during a college trip) to its finish (when that ever-so-slightly older young woman takes a breath and looks out — hopefully, nervously, excitedly — into a limitless future).
Lady Bird (Ronan) is really named Christine, but she has taken on the quirky moniker because she wants to be special; she yearns, in her teenage way, to be something, although it doesn’t much matter what.
“Lady Bird” unfolds over a year in the early aughts in Sacramento, California, following Lady Bird’s senior year at a Roman Catholic high school to her early college days. Along the way, it traces Lady Bird’s complex relationship with her mother (Laurie Metcalf), a nurse who works overtime to keep the family going after her husband (Tracy Letts) loses his job, and her tentative explorations of love, with two very different classmates (Lucas Hedges, Timothee Chalamet).
As an actor, Gerwig has shown an enchantingly light touch. She brings that to her work as director, too, as “Lady Bird” skims along happily, showing us Gerwig.
R (for language, sexual content, brief graphic nudity and teen partying) 1:33 at the Drexel, Gateway and Lennox 24 theaters moments both crucial and trivial in a teenage girl’s life. (There are moments here as funny as in any comedy this year, particularly a scene in which the school’s football coach gets drafted into directing the senior-class play.)
But the film has depth everywhere, in the note-perfect supporting performances (led by the great Metcalf, who practically vibrates with equal measures of endless love and profound irritation); in the gentle sense of place; and in the film’s palpable affection for its characters, who are often given the time and space to just hang with one another.
The film’s depiction of the quiet comfort of being with a best friend, for example, is unexpectedly moving.
At the center of it all is Ronan, whose face, as always, provides its own movie screen. She plays the flinty Lady Bird/Christine as both a blank slate and a sketched-in canvas — you can see the colors and nuances, filling themselves in, as she grows up before our eyes.
At a meeting at school with her college counselor, Lady Bird — whose grades aren’t stellar — says that she wants to leave California and go somewhere “like Yale, but not Yale because I probably couldn’t get in.”
The world for her is a book she’s desperate to open. The pleasure of “Lady Bird” is watching those pages begin to turn.
“Lady Bird.”