Lady Bird (2017)
Directed by Greta Gerwig
Lady Bird McPherson, a strong willed, deeply opinionated, artistic 17 year old comes of age in Sacramento. Her relationship with her mother and her upbringing are questioned and tested as she plans to head off to college.
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What critics say influenced Lady Bird
But the film it reminded me most of was Pretty in Pink , which first-time director Greta Gerwig—the actress best known for Frances Ha and 20th Century Women—is clearly paying homage to (there’s even a scene where Lady Bird wears a pink prom dress).
Lady Bird’s pink hair, repurposed prom dresses and self-proclaimed identity as living on the “wrong side of the tracks” may scream homage to “Pretty in Pink,” but this is a resoundingly modern, assuredly female-voiced comedy that portends more great things to come from Gerwig behind the camera.
Little wonder there are subtle echoes of “Pretty in Pink” throughout, from not one but two pink-hued frocks and a pair of unsuitable suitors to a dad who is down on his luck (playwright Tracy Letts) and a batch of pop oldies on the soundtrack (Alanis Morissette and Dave Matthews Band loom large).
Lady Bird and her mother stop bickering for a moment in the thrift store when they suddenly unite in the ecstasy of finding the perfect prom dress (inspired, Gerwig told me, by “Pretty in Pink”).
Both performances are remarkable, brittle and diffident in wholly original ways that distinguish Gerwg’s film from The Edge of Seventeen , Pretty in Pink , and other canonical coming-of-age works that attempt to honestly reckon with issues of privilege.
Mixing the introspective resilience of Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (which Gerwig co-wrote) with the whimsical emotional dramatics of a 1980s John Hughes comedic melodrama like Pretty in Pink or Some Kind of Wonderful , the movie never hits a false note, each beat of the story building one upon the next to produce a melodious coming of age symphony that’s absolutely sensational.
There is a drolly self-aware tone here that recalls Rushmore , and as with that Wes Anderson film, Lady Bird is so poised and fresh that it seems to herald a stellar career for its author.
The film that I would compare this to most, in terms of what it tells us about the filmmaker, is Rushmore .
There are echoes to Frances Ha (think of this as a kind of prequel), or even Anderson’s Rushmore , yet Lady Bird is very much its own thing, feeling both comfortable and entirely original at once.
Just to get things out of the way early, “Lady Bird” is a nearly perfect film—perhaps of the funniest and most endearing coming-of-age film to come along since “Rushmore.”
But, like Wes Anderson's Rushmore, Lady Bird juxtaposes its young protagonist's precious posturing with the rough-edged truths behind the curtain.
Those films were quite good, but neither quite nailed the tragi-comic tone of The Graduate , or even Rushmore .
In film after film, she’s let us see the social striving — posh, put-on accents, affected to-the-manner-born posing, feigned enthusiasm and self-promotion in every character (“Frances Ha,” “Mistress America”).
She co-authored her own star vehicle, “Frances Ha,” in 2012 with her longtime boyfriend and director Noah Baumbach, and the dialogue in “Lady Bird” is consistently and honestly funny and cliché-free.
In Frances Ha (2012), the first of two movies to date that Gerwig has co-written with her romantic partner, Noah Baumbach, who directed, she plays a twenty-seven-year-old struggling to, among other things, make it as a dancer in New York.
Gerwig, making her solo directing debut (she previously collaborated on the 2008 mumblecore movie Nights and Weekends with Joe Swanberg), injects Lady Bird with the kind of vivacious energy that suffused the films she co-wrote with the director Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha and Mistress America).
Undeniably reminiscent of Gerwig’s turn as a twentysomething wander in “Frances Ha,” the new movie may as well be its prequel.
Greta Gerwig, the one-time mumblecore starlet who wrote and directed the movie, has already established herself as a poet laureate of anxious youth, having co-authored and starred in Noah Baumbach’s bittersweet, screwball study of arrested development, Frances Ha .
Fans of Julia Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You and Thora Birch in Ghost World and American Beauty will be right at home with Christine, very much in the stable of wise-beyond-their-years, gobby teen malcontents.
…by Walter Chaw Greta Gerwig's hyphenate debut bears the influence of erstwhile collaborator Noah Baumbach's urbane micro-comedies--Hal Hartley's, too, along with some DNA borrowed from Ghost World and Welcome to the Dollhouse for spice.
She’s an insightful quipmaster à la teen heroines like Juno, Laney Boggs, the women of Ghost World , and others—even with variation, it’s a familiar archetype.
With its smart, snarky, anti-suburbs heroine—and a strong female friendship at its center— Lady Bird will remind some people of the great Ghost World .
Under Gerwig’s perceptive direction, Ronan spins on a dime from Ghost World sarcasm to open heart revelation as she maps Lady Bird’s fumbling from self-absorption to the first intimations of adulthood.
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The opening sequence is one for the ages, a deliberately paced mother-daughter fight that involves both women tearing up to “The Grapes of Wrath” on tape followed by a sudden, violent punchline that conveys the essence of the movie in a matter of minutes: smart, edgy, and unpredictable just when you think you’ve figured it out.
In the opening scene, the two of them listen to The Grapes of Wrath on tape in the car, weeping openly.
(At one point we watch them tooling along in the family car listening to an audiobook of The Grapes of Wrath—talk about California illusions.)
After sharing tears over an audio version of "The Grapes of Wrath," Marion says "let's just sit with what we've heard," with Lady Bird coming back with "Are you serious?"
One moment, mother and daughter are tight, weeping in the car over an audio book of The Grapes of Wrath (!); the next, Marion has turned on Lady Bird, pouring all her anxiety and self-doubt into her daughter’s head to the point where the girl throws herself out of the moving car.
Gerwig upgrades the teen realism of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and John Hughes’s Sixteen Candles .
Instead, those moments in Sixteen Candles , or Weird Science , we'll say, where he seemed to capture something so elementally correct about the human teen condition -- its churning chaos, and everyone's desperate bid to try and match a series of feelings and predilections to an actual identity -- it was if he were writing seated at a den filled with his angst-ridden protagonists as they wailed and laughed and sobbed their stories out to him.
“Sixteen Candles” (1984) and “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” (2012)).
Gerwig doesn’t try to capture the quirky zeitgeist and lingo a la Diablo Cody’s Juno – though comparisons will abound.
Surely Gerwig’s autobiography isn’t the point, but the fact that she expresses it with authenticity makes the film likable — and distinguishes it from the young-adult formula of Juno and The Edge of Seventeen .
Ronan is terrific, reminding us of Ellen Page’s star-making turn in “Juno.”
Beautiful yet still relatable enough to be the girl next door, clever without sounding like a cartoon character (paging Juno…), there is a special something about Ronan that makes you root for her to succeed as she tumbles headlong into growing up.
Not since Juno have we had a teenage heroine so comfortable in her own skin, so bursting with energy.
Instead, those moments in Sixteen Candles , or Weird Science , we'll say, where he seemed to capture something so elementally correct about the human teen condition -- its churning chaos, and everyone's desperate bid to try and match a series of feelings and predilections to an actual identity -- it was if he were writing seated at a den filled with his angst-ridden protagonists as they wailed and laughed and sobbed their stories out to him.
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And playwright/actor Tracy Letts (“The Lovers,” TV’s “Divorce”) tries his hand at warm and cute as “the good cop” dad, the one there to comfort and spoil his daughter and encourage the dreams her mom is hellbent on crushing.
But in recent years he’s also become one of film’s finest character actors, most recently in Indignation and The Lovers.
It's 2002 and her dad Larry (Tracy Letts, "The Lovers") is suffering in the current economic climate.
She lives with her intense, overbearing mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf, TV’s “Getting On”) and her doting nice-guy father Larry (Tracy Letts, “The Lovers”); her brother Miguel (Jordan Rodrigues, TV’s “The Fosters”) and his girlfriend Shelly (Marielle Scott, “Yield Right”) live there too.
Lady Bird’s father Larry is played by Tracy Letts, Tony and Pulitzer Prize winner and last seen onscreen in The Lovers .
Gerwig’s recollections of her own Catholic school days skip the emotional scarification and/or atmosphere of oppression that always seem to adorn these kinds of parochial-school memory movies (“Heaven Help Us” and the like).
Her school is not a dogmatic and formidable institution as seen in so many films about Catholic education, such as 1985’s Heaven Help Us , for Gerwig takes pains to show that its kindly nuns strive to help Lady Bird rise above her lack of scholastic achievements.