Lady Bird - Review Thread

Though I live in Los Angeles now and attended film school in San Francisco, I was raised in Sacramento, California.  It's a city that's fine, there's certainly far worse places to grow up in, but not particularly memorable for anything or impressive to anyone just passing through.  Very little is said about Sacramento and I've never been particularly fond of it until just recently since moving to Los Angeles and reflecting more on growing up there and how it shaped me to be the person that I am.  I recently went home during the Thanksgiving holiday and had a newfound appreciation for the city.  The leaves had changed colors, the weather was perfect, and catching up with family and friends was exactly the escape I needed from the never-ending bustle of Los Angeles.  You can imagine my surprise that there was a film coming out that was not just shot in Sacramento, but is about Sacramento, and further to my surprise is the most well reviewed film of 2017.  What?  Sacramento?  As they say in the film, the midwest of California?  The most familiar element of Greta Gerwig's directorial debut is how she channels exactly my same opinions and reflection on my adolescence of growing up there, embodying the desire of being young and dreaming of more while also looking back when away from home to finally appreciate it.  Lady Bird is a film that rings true, not just in its depiction of growing up in a city that isn't New York or Los Angeles or whatever, but also in what it means to be an adult and what it takes to truly understand who you are and how you got there.  The film just broke a Rotten Tomatoes record for the most successive positive reviews, and while I don't feel that the film is great or particularly groundbreaking in any way, I can certainly praise its authenticity and the confidence that Gerwig elicits behind the camera.  

The film focuses on Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), a high school senior who's eager to leave Sacramento for the East Coast and attend an esteemed college.  However, Lady Bird isn't the most gifted student and her family is struggling to make end's meet.  Also complicating matters for Lady Bird is her domineering mother (Laurie Metcalf) who criticizes her at every opportunity and seeks to keep her close to home.  The rest of the talented young cast rounds out with Lady Bird's best friend Julie (Beanie Feldstein), who provides the bulk of the laughs in the film, her love interests Danny (Lucas Hedges) and Kyle (Timothee Chalamet), and her underachieving brother, Miguel (Jordan Rodrigues).  The brisk running time of the film carries the viewer through Lady Bird's senior year as she attempts various activities in order to better her chance for an East Coast college, signaling her escape from Sacramento and her mother.

Perhaps the best element of Lady Bird is the genuine affection and personal touches of Gerwig that permeate the film.  It's not a very long movie thanks to its sharp editing, but every scene works due to the hilarious interactions and free flowing nature of the film while Gerwig steers her protagonist through the last period of adolescence.  Lady Bird makes mistakes, lots of them, and it's all pretty fun while being highly effective pieces of drama.  Gerwig does a great job maintaining the film's tone throughout its duration, and it's a rare movie where I felt that every scene had its place in the final cut.  A lot of this is due of course to Ronan's turn as the titular character.  She's infectiously likable and relatable as she dreams of escaping the only place she's known, and really just makes everything work as her character is a perfect catalysts for the other characters to feed through.  Lady Bird certainly feels a lot different from a lot of high school coming of age films too despite it hitting mostly familiar beats.  Gone are the stereotypical bullies, exaggerated social hierarchies, and nerds and instead it's a school that actually feels tangibly real.  Lady Bird pines to be one of the cooler kids, but she's not unpopular herself and seems to be pretty well liked by her peers.  Her relationships with the other characters feel credible, about as far removed from a John Hughes movie as could be.  It's another rare film where I never felt like what I was viewing wasn't organic.  Maybe that's in part related to my bias of being from the area, but Gerwig clearly is in her element here and captures everything with such authenticity that feels rarer and rarer in similar high school-centered films.  

At its core, Lady Bird is a story about a daughter and mother's relationship, and a complex one at that.  There never feels like there's malice between the two, but they are constantly butting heads and getting in each other's way.  At times it even feels like logic has been discarded in order to simply disagree with the other person to disagree.  At the film's climax, their relationship is pushed to its greatest test when Lady Bird goes behind her mother's back.  The damage has been done, but there's no time to properly reconcile.  Lady Bird's obsession with escaping Sacramento clashes with her mother's insistence that she stay, and the two squabble over trivial things acting ostensibly for this clash.  Gerwig's point being that it takes time and removing yourself from what you know in order to truly understand and appreciate it, and Lady Bird is ultimately a film about the desire to be something else while being pulled back by the comfort you know.  Lady Bird is a film that thrives off Gerwig's affectionate touch for the city she grew up in and Ronan's terrific performance, and both of them have delivered on one of the best films of the year.

8/10