In Lady Bird’s brisk hour-and-a-half run time, director Greta Gerwig addresses mental health, challenges dogma and embraces the inherently comical nature of aimless teenage angst. Any chance at a detached, analytical review of the film had escaped me before it reached its second act. In a strong field, one of Lady Bird ’s most defining features is its ability to feel simultaneously personal and universal. This is one of the many fruits achieved by the most impressive screenplay of the year. Unlike its wandering heroine, the script knows exactly what it needs to get done and when, with very little fat.
Lady BIrd is a film about “home”, and it explores all the wonderful and uncomfortable things that word means. No stone is left uncovered. Had I known how succinctly the film would capture every breed of tension that accompanies leaving the nest, I might not have so eagerly subjected myself to it. Thankfully, Gerwig was every bit as interested in crafting a genuinely funny picture as a heartfelt one. The dialogue retains wit without feeling stagey or harming Lady Bird’s hold on realism, an element that is further availed by its inspired cast.
Saoirse Ronan gives a powerful performance here, both charming and contemptible, glinting opposite the equally impressive Laurie Metcalf. Lady Bird opens with a particularly gripping scene featuring the two having the kind of fraught exchange that pervades the rest of the film. The tension is subtle and its resolve is neither dramatic nor defeatist. It’s right align with the risibly anticlimactic tone that makes its narrative so god damn relatable.
This is a dramedy that doesn’t forfeit the “real” for the “feel good.” Pithy histrionics exlaimed by our uncompromising lead like: “I want to live through something” are tempered evenly with bitter declarations uttered by the film's love-interest-send-up: “You’re gonna have so much unspecial sex in your life.” Lady Bird is a thoughtful commentary on womanhood, podunk aspirations and identity.
“What if this is the best version of myself?” a dejected Lady Bird asks in response to her mother’s concerns about her trajectory. This inquiry informs the heart of the film. It’s an inquiry that plagues us all, because it can’t ever really be answered. Gerwig makes no attempt to assure the audience that Christine “Lady Bird” Mcpherson is gonna be just fine. There’s isn’t some epigrammatic bookend to her story, and her flaws are amended as mutedly as they were introduced.
Lady Bird marks another admirable effort from A24, and a very promising start to what will hopefully be a very long directorial career for Gerwig.
