At an arresting point in Lady Bird, Christine’s mother tells her, “I want you to be the very best version of yourself.” The daughter quickly responds, “But what if this is the best version?”
It’s a question, rather than an answer but the firmness of it as an answer is surprising, and cuts deep.
Lady Bird is full of dialogues that feel as if they were conceived while an improvisation was on. The words are not showy, but they carry a certain knowingness about self that only a lived in character could sprout.
If you’ve been a follower of Greta Gerwig’s career, this shouldn’t be a shocker. She’s been writing, acting and co-directing comedies that were clearly excavated out of experiences that continue to shape her. Her solo directorial debut Lady Bird carries the same grain of autobiographical fiction. The character of Christine is broadly the younger version of Greta, the mumblecore mama, played by Saoirse Ronan with acne on her face, and pomegranate coloured hair. The film is set in 2002, in a post 9/11 society, where teen angst hardly mattered in the face of a looming war on terror.
The tough exterior of the film is that of a teenage comedy, filled with the usual props of struggle in school and growing up in America: the apprehension of tests, the madness of school plays, the concerns of higher education, and prom, the glorious of them all. There is also falling in love with one, and crushing on another. The contention with the sibling, the affection and frustration with parents are there too. It might all sound too familiar, but what makes Lady Bird a standout from other teenage comedies is its attention to detail.
Gerwig treats her characters as if she’s revisiting them from memory. There is a convinced fairness in bringing out the absurdity of each character. She knows them too well to ridicule them, and looking back, she coats them with her genteel understanding, strikingly nulling out condescension. In short, if the exterior looks into comic sketches, the interior anchors it with empathy.
The film is also a love letter to a hometown that many of us were desperate to leave, to fly out in the wide open sky. It takes a simple exchange to shower us with a perceptiveness we have taken years to fathom. When Sister Sarah Joan (the wonderful Lois Smith) examines Christine’s application essay on her hometown, the sleepy Sacramento, California, she tells her, “It’s clear how much you love Sacramento.” Christine, quite like what we expect of her, says, “I guess I pay attention.” “Don’t you think they’re the same thing?” the astute teacher asks. Another question in the service of an answer
By now, we are aware of Christine’s exasperation with her hometown. She hates it here, and can’t wait to move to New York city, or in Connecticut or New Hampshire, where writers live in the woods. Gerwig deftly holds our consideration here, telling us Christine is not hinting at self-flattery, rather the unawareness of what her words and actions really mean, perhaps her older self will have a different version of it while looking back.
The impact of capitalism is not really spelled out, but there’s a sly commentary on how money colours relationships. Christine’s mother works double shifts because her father is jobless, a fact that often incenses the mother while dealing with her ungrateful offspring. Christine dumps her best friend Julie (Beanie Feldstein) to get close to the school’s queen bee Jenna (Odeya Rush) who is so wealthy that Christine has to pretend to be uber rich.
Christine’s first boyfriend Danny (Lucas Hedges of Manchester By The Sea) invites her to the Thanksgiving feast to his grandmother’s house which Christine always called her dream house. Her crush Kyle (Timothée Chalamet of Call Me By Your Name) is “trying as much as possible not to participate in our economy” though he is deeply ensconced in the luxury of a well-heeled lifestyle.
Lady Bird is also a hat tip to our teenage selves who were too fast and too furious to know how our words and gestures can hurt our parents. Like all of us, Christine can hardly take into account the emotional lives of her parents, and this shows up in her impulsive outbursts. Christine’s father Larry played by Tracy Letts is the homeliest father you could ever imagine. But Gerwig holds a candle unambiguously to the tenuous mother-daughter relationship, illuminating an undeniable compassion that recollection of days of being wild can bring. Like Christine, it’s also the story of Marion.
Marion says the most vicious things a mother can possibly tell her daughter in a civilised society, constantly admonishing her for being self-centred. The fights and exchanged words are heartbreaking, but they also reveal the harsh truth of parents realising how their offspring has grown up, ready to leave the nest. Gerwig leads us to this heart-rending truth without manipulation, because along the way she also tells us how beautiful the mother-daughter bond can be, regardless of the number of fights they have had.
When they discover the perfect dress at a shop, lighting up like two best friends attuned to each other’s tastes, you know a river of warmth is flowing beneath this resentment. TV veteran Laurie Metcalf plays Marion with a layered precision that veers towards acting masterclass, making the worries and insecurities of a mother gently tactile. Marion might not be ready for the final goodbye, but when she drives away from her daughter at the airport, you cry along with her.
Above all, Lady Bird is about assertion of identity, however average you are. The title of the film is derived from Christine’s declaration to be called Lady Bird, which she explains “it’s given to me, by me”. The film takes bumbling romances, hurtling friendships and fraught family tensions to make Christine deal with the self-image she has drawn for herself, though she is not really sure what this vague sense of self is. Ronan, rightfully recognised with an Oscar nomination plays Christine as if she has inherited her feelings after waking up one fine morning.
The quality that makes Lady Bird a marvel in the world of teen protagonists is that it refuses to make her a cliché of troubled youth that we are so used to watching on screen. She is hardly a special case of reckless rebel, or an awkward misfit, but a common, average adolescent who wants to be her own self, despite anxieties lurking everywhere. For long, we’ve had boys growing up. This time, a girl comes of age, and the specificity of this typical teen is what makes her so special.
(The writer is a journalist, a screenwriter, and a content developer who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. He tweets @RanjibMazumder)