Film review: Lady Bird | Daily Mail Online

By Pippa Bailey For You Magazine

Published: 00:02 GMT, 11 February 2018 | Updated: 00:29 GMT, 11 February 2018

Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut is big-hearted, earnest, goofy, profound and utterly charming, writes Pippa Bailey

Saoirse Ronan (left) as the self-style Lady Bird alongside Beanie Feldstein as friend Julie

A semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story set in golden-hour California, complete with too-short school skirts, ‘unspecial sex’ and a final-act prom scene. In the hands of many directors, Lady Bird would be self-indulgent, cliched and painfully indie. Thank God, then, for Greta Gerwig. The long-time Noah Baumbach collaborator and actress may not appear on screen in her solo directorial debut, but her character is all over it: Lady Bird is big-hearted, earnest, goofy, profound and utterly charming.

Saoirse Ronan gives her most sensitive and commanding performance since Atonement as the self-styled Lady Bird – real name Christine McPherson – a bristling, pink-haired teenager from the ‘wrong side of the tracks’, who attends a posh Catholic school on a scholarship and dreams of escaping Sacramento, ‘the Midwest of California’, to go ‘where the culture is’ for college.

The film opens in 2002 and follows Lady Bird through her final year year of high school, passing all the recognisable milestones: turning 18, applying for college, losing her virginity. Lady Bird rejects everything her parents have given her, including her name, lying about where she lives to hide the reality of her family’s rocky financial situation.

Ronan is Oscar-nominated for her lead role

The film’s unusually fully fleshed-out family unit is at its best in Lady Bird’s critical but caring mother Marion, played impeccably by the oft-underused Laurie Metcalf. The film doesn’t shy away from its characters’ less appealing traits, and the pair argue frequently and brutally, fueled by frustration, miscommunication and a fundamental disconnect in the way they see the world. Special mention, too, for Tracy Letts, who is wonderful as Lady Bird’s gentle, depressed father Larry.

Gerwig is equally adept at drawing her lead’s fumbling, fraught and funny school days, which will be nostalgically familiar to anyone who has ever, well, been a teenager. Highlights include Lady Bird’s touching relationship with BFF Julie (in one scene they chomp through communion wafers while giggling about masturbation), flirting in the pews during assembly, and a gym teacher drafted in to direct a play.

Along the way she careens into two boys, sensitive drama star Danny (Lucas Hedges) and wannabe anarchist Kyle (Timothee Chalamet, two of Hollywood’s biggest young stars) but her story isn’t defined by them. Instead, Lady Bird bumps against them incidentally, using and being used in similar measure.

Rising star Lucas Hedges plays Lady Bird’s one-time boyfriend Danny

The film turns on the lead’s mood, conversations souring on a single word and promptly leaping back to laughter with dexterity. The camera, too, is focused on Ronan, moving as she moves and resting as she rests. Digitally shot but edited to be grainy and slightly sepia, Lady Bird has both a memory-like haziness and punchy colours; you would be forgiven for thinking that it was captured on film.

At a tight 94 minutes, Gerwig’s creation is spare and sharp in both shot and script. The witty and heartbreaking one-liners come quicker than you can commit them to memory, which is frustrating because you will want to. Save for a brief burst of Justin Timberlake, she has wisely avoided the irritating littering of cultural references that many films of the genre relish.

Both Lady Bird and its eponymous lead are at once typical and individual, prickly and tender, playful and mournful – in other words, gloriously teenage.

 

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