Lady Bird

Saoirse Ronan in Greta Gerwig's "Lady Bird" 

Last week before “Lady Bird”, the new film written and directed by Greta Gerwig, was screened, I didn’t feel good. There was a tension in my neck. I gripped my throat, feeling constantly thirsty. I was driving down Beverly Drive and turned right onto Charleville Boulevard before parking in the same place I always park on Doheny Drive right in front of this beautifully lived-in Spanish Revival Duplex. I reached over to the passenger seat of my car and grabbed my water bottle, looking at the traffic start and stop, focusing on the tail lights of Tesla’ s and BMW’s stopping ahead of me. Over and over, I would chug water, until there was no water left. I knew this feeling, and sometimes I can manage it, and sometimes I can’t. I was worried that being far from home, from family and friends, from the comforts of the familiar, that my anxiety would rear it’s fiercely deformed head.

Once I walked to the theater three blocks away and sat down in the same seat I always sit in I watched each person come inside searching for a comfortable spot. There were many seats open, but a panic usually set in. Where was the best seat? Can I see with this person in front of me? I laughed to myself. When I took my phone out of my pocket, I became upset, it wasn’t distracting me the way I relied on it to and for a second I got nervous.

I’m not going to take the time to discuss the inner workings of my brain, maybe another day, and another post, but I will say that it’s different for each person. For me, anxiety comes at times I can’t predict, like say before watching a movie that I fell completely in love with. So with “Lady Bird”, a movie so touching, and so deeply personal, I can honestly say that I felt my anxiety melt away with each passing minute.

* * *

Christine wants to be called Lady Bird, so her mom calls her by that name, as do her friends, her teachers, her family, even the nuns at her Catholic School. It is 2002, and we are in Sacramento, California, that forgotten capital city. The cinematographer Sam Levy and costume designer April Napier, both of whom spoke to us after the film was screened, understand this time period and place almost as well as Greta Gerwig, who grew up there. She loves Northern California the way Joan Didion loved Southern California. The landscape informs the emotions of her characters, the weather reflects their attitudes. Sacramento has never been filmed more tenderly.

“Lady Bird” is about a 17 year old girl, played by Saoirse Ronan, and simply put, it’s about her coming of age during her senior year in high school. She desperately wants to go to College on the East Coast, her mother works too much, her father is out of work. She flip- flops friends and boyfriends and hair colors. I was reminded of Angela Chase from the short-lived television series “My So-Called Life”, whose hair was a similar shade of red, or ‘crimson glow’. That series understood teenagers and treated them with respect, allowing a platform for the emotions most adults would dismiss as juvenile, without any true meaning.

Greta Gerwig is 34 years old. The last film she wrote being 2015’s “Mistress America”, which was a female friendship analysis wrapped with a screwball comedy bow. But now, with “Lady Bird”, she has achieved something much more powerful. Through the rearview mirror of her own life and experiences, her love letter to Sacramento becomes something rare, specific and universal. The decision to cast the young Irish actress Saoirse Ronan as Lady Bird, who is able to convey more with her ice blue eyes than most actresses twice or even three times her age, was very wise, as was casting the theater veterans Tracy Letts, and most especially Laurie Metcalf as her mother, Marion. Metcalf is just as expressive an actress as Ronan, with an elastic face and a curious way of phrasing. We believe them as mother and daughter, their fights are piercing, their love, palpable. Gerwig's script is perfectly written, attuned to the rhythm of how people actually talk, and even more, how they react. 

I'm not quite sure how to describe my feelings about this movie, which is how I feel after any movie I truly fall for. I will say though, that it moved me in surprising and profound ways, and the ending, a whirlwind of moments ending in a monologue delivered by Ronan is a voicemail, spoken in fresh air. I won't say anymore. In that last scene, which as a viewer we know is so so important, we watch as Greta Gerwig becomes master at emotional and tonal clarity. Everything we have previously watched is summed up in those last moments. It is sad, funny, true, warm, something special.