[rating=9.00]
In the opening scene of writer/director Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, Christine (Saoirse Ronan) converses with her mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf) about their tour of college campuses up and down the west coast. It soon escalates into an argument (like most of their conversations tend to do) when Christine starts talking about her desire to attend college in New York. Things gradually get more heated, until Christine opens up the passenger door and leaps from her seat.
Cut to Christine sitting in a pew of her Catholic high school, singing a hymn, with her arm in a cast. She survived the debacle, but in her mind, she might not survive the mundane boredom of her life in Sacramento. She dubs it “the midwest of California,” and despite her family’s financial hardship, she’s bound and determined to get as far away from everything she knows by the time she graduates.
It’s a common sentiment held by many of us who remember being at the cusp of adulthood, ready to shed off the husk of their past life and start fresh in a new place with new expectations. Christine even has a jump-start with her self-ascribed nickname, along with a determination that nothing will be able to hold her back, financial, family, or otherwise.
Along the way, we watch as Christine starts to accrue the experiences that will help shape her adult life. Her first boyfriend, then her second. Her first job. Her first after-school job where she can learn responsibility while hoping to put aside enough money to offset the costs of her out-of-state ambitions.
Out of these experiences come the film’s central theme: the definition, and eventual appreciation, of home. Through all this, Gerwig, a Hollywood veteran who’s worn almost every hat during her already impressive career, proves herself a skilled storyteller and director. She paints what might have been an otherwise ordinary coming-of-age tale with particular skill, balancing humor and heart, while never letting a single character come off as two-dimensional. In the end, regardless of who you are, it’s impossible not to see at least a little of your self in Christine, and empathize why she insists on being called Lady Bird.
Lady Bird is now playing in theaters everywhere. You can read our interview with Greta Gerwig here.
