Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson goes to a Catholic school in Sacramento and hates just about everything about her life. She longs to go to school on the east coast, but her poor family can't afford to send her there. The film follows her as she figures out who she is and gets through her last year of high school as she finds and loses love, inspiration, and friends.
I found Lady Bird to be an incredibly annoying teenager. She didn't care about anyone but herself and continually hurt people along the way to "finding herself." I was completely with her when she joined drama and found passion acting. I felt for her when her boyfriend turned out to be gay and he broked down thinking of how to come out to his family. I also loved the moments with her best friend Julie while they vandalized a nuns car, ate communion wafers while talking about masturbation, and their fun time at the prom. Those moments were amazing along with the performances all around.
For every one of those moments, there's a moment of her being awful. Her awesome friends are pushed to the side when she lies to be in the popular, rich crowd. The most annoying thing about her is the college issue. She wants to go to the east coast only to get away from Sacramento. Her parents are barely financially hanging on and she convinces her dad to pay for this frivolous endeavor. I understand having flawed characters and coming of age films, but manipulating everyone around for your own selfish reasons doesn't make you a sympathetic character.
The writing didn't reach me for much of the film, especially regarding Lady Bird's mom. Her character came off as unrealistically mean. She literally couldn't say one nice thing to her daughter without some rude or backhanded comment right afterwards. The big blowouts are expected and they happen with cruel comments that you wish you could take back. However, she seems completely unable to be nice. I can think of two moments, one where she described being in awe of Sacramento while driving and at the end of the film when she ran into the airport to see Lady Bird off to college too late and cried, that are tiny glimpses of the real person underneath.
Lady Bird is an incredibly well acted film, but frankly not very well written. I didn't find Lady Bird to be sympathetic through most of the film and her mother especially was not a nuanced character at all. Ronan is a wonderful actress, but simply too old for the role. The film takes place around the time I went to high school and I didn't feel the time period at all. The ending shows that Lady Bird didn't really learn anything and continues her antics on the east coast on her parents' dime. This coming of age story didn't resonate with me overall and it's hard to ignore the criticism that Gerwig stole scenes from Real Women Have Curves and whitewashed it for her film.
My rating: 3/5 fishmuffins
1 comment:
Loved it but I was expecting a comedy. It was not comedic.I gave it 5 stars because it was an excellent film, albeit painful. Maybe one would have had to be in this type of mother-daughter relationship, be a bit of an outcast w/a best friend-outcast, and have lived circa that time period to have understood the emotional jarring it gave me. *However*, that's said, I understand why the critics loved it: The actors were well cast, the Directing was excellent, the writing/script - phenomenal . It was an excellently performed drama but not even close to a comedy. Although it did have some comedic moments, it was her warm and loving, very cool, dad and their close relationship which saved the movie from being a complete cry-fest, for me.
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