Sunday, November 26, 2017

LADY BIRD (2017): Coming-of-Age Story



Considering how many bad coming of age stories exist in the film industry, Lady Bird is comparably refreshing.  It’s short at 93 minutes.  The two main leads, Saoirse Ronan, as the daughter Lady Bird and Laurie Metcalf as Marion the mother, are genuine human beings rather than caricatures.  Their arguments and struggles as well as begrudged affection for each other does not come across as affected.  And the movie overall is not ham-handed or cynical like the typical coming-of-age film.  It’s not perfect, either.

Lady Bird is in her senior year of attending a Catholic high school in Sacramento, California, and hopes to attend college at an eastern school.  A few things are getting in her way, however.  Her family is not rich.  Lady Bird’s grades are insufficient.  And most importantly, her mother is opposed to her going east.

In the meantime, Lady Bird mildly rebels against the Catholic school she attends, but never to the point where she rejects its authority.  She has her first sexual encounter during her senior year, smokes cigarettes and occasionally smokes marijuana, and fights and makes up with her best friend, Julie (Beanie Feldstein).  She has two boyfriends during the film.  One is Danny (Lucas Hedges), a seemingly honest and innocent boy who we discover, in the most contrived manner, is gay.  The other boyfriend, Kyle (Timothée Chalamet), deflowers Lady Bird only to reveal afterwards he’s been with a number of girls before.  Frankly, Kyle was not a necessary character in the film.

The only important relationship in the entire film is between Lady Bird and her mother.  The mother and daughter cry together, fight and almost always in the end makeup. Lady Bird’s affectionate father, Larry (Tracy Letts) mostly remains in the background and has little impact in pacifying the strong wills of his wife and daughter.  Sometimes the mother and daughter badly hurt each other, and the hurt never entirely goes away – even when Lady Bird finally receives acceptance to a college in New York.  Bored and frustrated with Sacramento, Lady Bird’s relationship with the city is similar to that with her mother (the symbolism is a bit forced). 

To listen to certain reviewers, you would think such a film is something never seen before.  It makes one nervous hearing terms such as honest and special and lovely and warm loosely thrown around like we’ve run out of other verbs or adverbs or adjectives to describe the film.  None of these superlatives are particularly precise.  Probably the most accurate review I read described the film as self-conscious while redeemed by the acting of Ronan and Metcalf.  It went on to label Greta Gerwig’s directing style as “stiff and mannered.”  (http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2017/09/telluride-17-lady-bird.html)

I liked Lady Bird probably as much as any film in this kind of genre.  That’s not saying all that much.  But when the mother and daughter characters are on screen together, the film is powerful.  These scenes come close to making the viewer uncomfortable and help us appreciate the difficulties families go through when adolescent children are present.  The script also treats these difficulties with great care.  Without that mother/daughter relationship, the film would not be unique.  With the exception of Larry and Julie, none of the other characters in the film come even close to full development.  And very few scenes where the two main characters are not together leave any lasting impression.

As many reviewers point out (and without maybe even being aware of what they are saying), there was nothing groundbreaking in this film.  I have difficulty believing we will remember this film in a few years.   Hopefully, Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf will go on to play other roles in the future that helps us remember them better.  The credit for any value of this film should go all to them.

November 25, 2017


© Robert S. Miller 2017