Lady Bird spreads her delightful wings

Did a fair amount of last minute homework prior to the Oscars this year, and Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird was one of my most pleasing discoveries. This completely engaging and very personal-feeling coming-of -age story about a young girl’s senior year in Sacramento, California paints a truly superb portrait of someone on the cusp of adulthood desperately trying to break free of the confines of their present and launch themselves into their passionately imagined future. Saoirse Ronan is the oddly named Lady Bird (“It’s my given name, I gave it to myself!”), navigating the constraints of a Catholic school, fledgling boyfriends and a protective mother (a phenomenal Laurie Metcalf). 

Lady Bird does things you seldom see in American films: its protagonists aren’t rich. They’re realistically doing their best to get by, with the idea of affording a long-distance college seemingly insurmountable. Parents have to tell their kids “We don’t need to buy that,” in stores. Lady Bird also gives us an extremely believable (and sometimes flawed) main character who is instantly relatable – the pangs of yearning, of longing for more, of the need for greater prospects, are depicted all too well. It also actually gives us characters who fight and rage, without completely losing sight of the fact that they love each other – but who are ruled by emotion and the call of the horizon.

Laurie Metcalf’s Marion is one of my favorite performances of the year, and I really wish she hadn’t lost out on best supporting actress to Allison Janney’s showier role in I, Tonya. Don’t get me wrong, Janney is awesome – but that character is pretty over-the-top compared to the quieter and more real-world frustrations and sacrifices that Metcalf portrays. That holding onto a relationship with a spirited teenager can be an Olympic-level challenge at times. 

Gerwig does remarkable work as a director, with a story that one suspects has a fair amount of autobiographical shading (Gerwig is also from Sacramento with a nurse mother and a financial consultant/programmer father – and also went to Catholic school). The tone swings between both Juno and Napoleon Dynamite, but always feels unique and refreshingly truthful. I found myself pining right alongside Lady Bird, for her dreams to see light, for her to be understood – but also for the all too often underappreciated heroics of parenting. Either way, you’re going to care mightily – Lady Bird is a picture with tremendous heart.