Fizzily funny coming-of-age flick
‘IWISH I could live through something.” So sighs Christine Mcpherson, the spiky, moody, flawed and delightful protagonist of Lady Bird.
The movie takes its title from the name Christine has bestowed upon herself during her senior year at a Roman Catholic high school in Sacramento, which she sniffily dubs “the Midwest of California”.
Everything’s terrible in
Lady Bird’s life right now: Her educational prospects; her love life (it’s complicated in the prefacebook sense of the term); and especially her mother, whose daily doses of doubt, anxiety and engulfing unconditional love put Lady Bird in a swivet of headspinning mixed messages.
As a funny, poignant dramatisation of a year in the life of an American teenager, Lady Bird follows the usual comingof-age arc of missteps, regrets and amusing reckonings. But in the hands of Greta Gerwig, who makes her solo writing and directing debut here, what might have been a by-the-numbers proposition turns out to be fizzily funny and wistfully affecting, a story whose familiar contours nevertheless contain something utterly original and revelatory.
Gerwig became famous as an actress in films by such observant generational chroniclers as Joe Swanberg and Noah Baumbach; it’s tempting – and not a little bit sexist – to believe that she’s learned at the feet of the masters.
The insight and assurance of Lady Bird suggests that it was she lending wisdom and taste to her male colleagues all along.
Lady Bird opens on a lovely shot of the title character, played by Saoirse Ronan, sleeping faceto-face with her mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf). They’re in a motel while touring college campuses. On the way home, an idle conversation escalates into a heated argument, culminating in Lady Bird opening the door of the moving car and diving out.
Anyone who’s lived within the emotional cyclone known as adolescence will recognise the vertiginous highs and lows of Lady Bird, ambitions.
Ronan, the Irish actress who delivered such a delicate, gossamer-light performance in Brooklyn, completely transforms herself here into an entitled American teenager circa 2003, when Dave Matthews, Alanis Morissette and clove cigarettes were retro-cool.
Filmed on location in Gerwig’s home town of Sacramento, Lady Bird invokes the city’s other famous daughter, Joan Didion, right off the bat – an homage that informs a movie that feels like a fond look back and a final nail, simultaneously.
With a superb ear, eye for detail and a whip-smart knack for structure and pacing, Gerwig captures the parts of life that are both banal and deeply hurtful.
Gerwig keeps Lady Bird afloat with a steady stream of knowing humour – not only at the hands of its blissfully self-confident title character, but also her sweet best friend, Julie, played in a dazzling breakout performance by Beanie Feldstein.
The scenes of Lady Bird and Julie crying, giggling, fighting and dancing are chief among the myriad pleasures of the film. The girl at its centre may not be a heavyweight, but her movie is epic. – The Washington Post