Lady Bird (2017)

Official trailer

Lady Bird is Greta Gerwig’s 2017 American coming-of-age drama.

The film depicts Christine Lady Bird McPherson during her senior year at a Catholic high school in Sacramento, California, in 2002. Lady Bird deals with her difficult relationship with her mother, her wealthier friends, her first romantic relationships with theater boy Danny and rock musician Kyle, and her plans to attend an East Coast college that her family can’t afford. Saoirse Ronan plays Lady Bird. Laurie Metcalf plays her mother Marion. Tracy Letts plays her father Larry. Lucas Hedges plays Danny.

Timothée Chalamet plays Kyle. Beanie Feldstein plays Lady Bird’s best friend Julie. Lois Smith plays Sister Sarah Joan. Stephen McKinley Henderson plays Father Leviatch. Odeya Rush plays popular girl Jenna. Gerwig wrote the screenplay. A24 released the film on a budget of approximately 10 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 79 million dollars worldwide. The work received five Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, Best Director for Gerwig, and Best Actress for Ronan.

I come away from Lady Bird wrecked in the best way. It’s funny, it’s sharp-tongued when it needs to be, and the fight between mother and daughter at its center feels truer than the teen-movie formula usually allows. It sits at a 9 with only a small quibble, and nearly all of my affection for it runs through Laurie Metcalf.

Greta Gerwig made her directorial debut with Lady Bird, one of the foundational American coming-of-age films of the 2010s.

Gerwig had previously co-written Frances Ha (2012) and Mistress America (2015) with Noah Baumbach. Her solo directorial work showed authority that conventional debuts typically don’t exhibit. The film plays as autobiography filtered through invented character. Gerwig grew up in Sacramento, attended a Catholic high school, and pursued an East Coast college education against her family’s preferences.

It isn’t literally autobiography, but Lady Bird draws on Gerwig’s specific Sacramento experience in ways that broader teen drama couldn’t have generated. The film achieved critical reception that few directorial debuts have matched. Gerwig’s later films, including Little Women (2019) and Barbie (2023), have made her one of the principal American filmmakers of her generation.

The Mother-Daughter Center

Mother-daughter drama drives Lady Bird instead of conventional teen romance. Marion McPherson is the film’s true antagonist, though the film carefully refuses to make her villainous. Marion loves her daughter while being unable to express the love in ways Lady Bird can recognize.

Marion criticizes her daughter constantly. Marion refuses to speak to her daughter for weeks after Lady Bird accepts the East Coast college. Marion drives away instead of entering the airport during the departure. The relationship reflects realities that conventional teen drama typically softens.

Laurie Metcalf received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Marion, and I’d have handed her the statue. She carries Marion’s financial anxiety and her real love at the same time without simplifying either of them. The performance takes on weight in the closing sequences, when Lady Bird learns that Marion wrote her several unfinished letters during the silent period and that her husband retrieved them from the trash. That discovery is the scene that justifies the rating for me.

Ronan as Lady Bird

Saoirse Ronan plays Lady Bird with the controlled intelligence the role requires, and I’m delighted by how prickly she lets her be. Lady Bird is smart enough to recognize her own bad behavior and unable to consistently prevent it. She’s generous enough to keep her friendship with Julie even after ditching her for the popular crowd, and honest enough to push back on her mother’s criticism while absorbing it anyway. Ronan never asks me to like her, and I end up rooting for her completely.

Ronan received a Best Actress nomination for the performance, her third Academy nomination by age twenty-three. Her career has consistently engaged with intelligent young women whose intelligence hasn’t produced clear life paths. Atonement (2007), Brooklyn (2015), and her later work extend this pattern. Few actresses of her generation have produced comparable consistency of serious dramatic work across roles that didn’t depend on conventional youthful glamour.

The Sacramento Specificity

Gerwig grew up in Sacramento and built the film around the particular qualities of the city she remembered. The Sacramento neighborhoods, schools, and culture reflect actual conditions instead of generic California setting. The opening sequence has Lady Bird and her mother driving through Sacramento listening to The Grapes of Wrath audiobook. Lady Bird expresses her hatred of Sacramento in ways teenagers from any provincial city express their hatred of where they grew up.

The closing sequence has Lady Bird, now in New York, calling her mother to apologize and recognizing the beauty of Sacramento she couldn’t see while living there.

The move from rejecting a place to recognizing it captures something that happens to most American teenagers from non-coastal cities.

The film argues that a place’s value becomes visible only after leaving makes it emotionally permissible to see. The Sacramento setting matters because Lady Bird can’t appreciate it while she lives there. That phone call from New York is the ending I’d have chosen, and it moves me more than any big climax could.

Is Lady Bird as good as people say?

Gerwig’s directorial debut, Lady Bird, is a film I’d put near the top of any list of 2010s coming-of-age movies. The mother-daughter center has real love alongside the fighting, Ronan makes a smart, difficult girl easy to root for, and Sacramento holds the theme. It’s a 9 because it gets nearly everything right. The Kyle thread is the one strand that feels thinner than the rest to me, and it’s minor enough that it barely dents my affection for the film.

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