80 | 4 stars | A-
Director: Greta Gerwig
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts
Synopsis: A rebellious teenager spends one last year in her hometown of Sacramento, determined to go abroad for her studies.
Genre: Coming-of-age
Key awards: Golden Globes – Best Motion Picture (Musical/ Comedy); Academy Awards – 5 nominations
Runtime: 94 minutes
Language: English
Singapore rating: M18 (nudity and sexual scene)
Your first kiss. Your first partner. The first time you smoked, got high, had sex. The day you came of age and could flash your ID into R-rated movies, buy cigarettes, peruse porno magazines. Prom night. University applications. Small-town girl visiting the big city for the first time. Scrawling your crush’s name on your bedroom wall.
Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird triumphantly invokes an uplifting nostalgia out of these memories, transplanting us back in time – for those already past their prime – and hinting, to the newly-pubescent, of what is to come. Set in Sacramento, California, in the year 2002, the film follows Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), a rebellious seventeen-year-old with the dream of living in the city and attending a college more prestigious than her current Catholic high school.
Christine’s family is not an affluent one; her mother struggles to pay the bills, her father is outwardly cheerful but withdrawn when alone; and the prospect of an Ivy League future seems remote even with scholarships. She lives with her parents, Miguel, her adopted stepbrother, and his girlfriend Shelly. They work at the neighbourhood supermarket to make ends meet.
Her financial insecurity translates to an emotional one. At school, her grades are less than stellar, although she excels in acting, successfully staging Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Her plump best friend Julie she abandons for Jenna, a popular rule-breaking student, all because Jenna knows a guy she’s interested in. Christine, or “Lady Bird” as she doggedly reminds her acting instructor, lies about her family, telling Jenna that her house is the one with “the white shutters with the American flag in front”, the neighbourhood’s biggest. Jenna, naturally, pays her a visit, and that doesn’t go down so well.
Laurie Metcalf plays Marion, her mother, a force of annoyance and irritation, something that gets in the way of Lady Bird’s idyllic and romantic conception of youth. She nags at her, berates her for coming home late, and reminds her that reading in bed is “something that rich people do. We’re not rich people.” In the film’s opening shot, the two of them sleep in a hotel side by side, soundly. They then drive back home listening to Steinbeck over the radio; mother and daughter get worked up over a radio; Lady Bird laments the unexciting state of affairs, while Marion launches into a deprecating spiel of her daughter’s untempered idealism; Lady Bird opens the car door and exits as the car speeds down a highway.
She is in a way ashamed of her family, how they, instead of allowing her to pursue her dreams and live life creatively, are caught up in debt, stuck in the “soul-killing” small-town of Sacramento, and mired in practical, boring reality. At school, religious doctrine sometimes gets the better of her free-spirited, independent nature; at friends’, her forays into sex and dating encounter disappoint and end in heartbreak.
Gerwig portrays all this with remarkable nuance and ease, never once reliant on dramatic clichés or contrived resolutions. The banter between Lady Bird and Marion, when the two aren’t in conflict, is incredibly sweet and charming; mother and daughter as besties, trying to eke out a hopeful and fun living amidst uncertainties about the future. It is, after all, post 9/11, and the bombs are going off in Iraq, as the TV set in Lady Bird’s room reminds us.
Timothée Chalamet (Call Me by Your Name) and Lucas Hedges (Manchester by the Sea) appear as Lady Bird’s two boyfriends, and their performances, especially Hedges’, are impressive in their audacious authenticity, a thing not often seen in cinema today. Take, for example, 20th Century Women (2016), in which Gerwig stars as a boardinghouse tenant being treated for cancer; the film’s glossy smugness easily and superficially glides over the lives of its multi-faceted characters, who are only multi-faceted because they are supposed to represent and champion various social causes – sex, feminism, et cetera.
Not Lady Bird. Sam Levy’s cinematography certainly frames its subjects under the slightly-fading light of a photo album, and the clothes, music, and mise-en-scėne are straight out of the early 2000s. But its characters also are made to deal with things any ordinary teen, growing up in a free country, would have to deal with. Friendships, relationships, scholarships, parent-and-child-ships; Lady Bird embraces this entirety, painting the process of growing up in a fond but focused light, illuminating its ups and downs. Its titular rebel asks her mother, as she picks her prom dress, if she “likes”, and not just “loves”, her. Marion is lost for words. She replies, somewhat perfunctory, that she wants Lady Bird to be “the very best version” of herself. Lady Bird then asks, “What if this is the best version?” At the very beginning, a quote from Joan Didion reads: “Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.”
This is a film about growing up and growing to love oneself, one’s family, one’s home. A terrific film it is.