{"id":6187,"date":"2017-12-01T10:50:28","date_gmt":"2017-12-01T15:50:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=6187"},"modified":"2018-01-31T20:05:20","modified_gmt":"2018-02-01T01:05:20","slug":"lady-bird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2017\/12\/01\/lady-bird\/","title":{"rendered":"Lady Bird."},"content":{"rendered":"

Greta Gerwig\u2019s directorial debut, Lady Bird<\/em>, has been in the news this week as it set a record on Rotten Tomatoes for the most positive (\u201cfresh\u201d) reviews received without a single negative (\u201crotten\u201d) one, 184 such reviews<\/a> and counting. It\u2019s a coming-of-age story, incredibly well-acted throughout, with a number of truly hilarious moments in it, enough that I\u2019d join the chorus (if my review counted) of positive reviews \u2026 but the movie has its flaws too, particularly in the way the adult characters are written, as if Gerwig, who also wrote the script, put her primary efforts in the teenagers at the heart of the film.<\/p>\n

Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) is Christine McPherson, who has chosen \u201cLady Bird\u201d as her nickname and repeatedly crosses out or corrects Christine whenever it\u2019s used to refer to her, a high school senior in Sacramento who comes from \u201cthe wrong side of the tracks,\u201d a family of four living in a somewhat run-down house and dealing with the economic insecurity of many Americans in the lower and lower middle classes. Her father\u2019s company keeps laying people off; her mother is working double shifts as a psychiatric nurse; her brother and his wife live in the house as well, both working grocery store jobs despite their college degrees. Lady Bird yearns to break free of the social and financial constraints of her life, to go to college in the Northeast, to experience more than her small* town can give her, so she embarks on a number of small misadventures while also secretly applying to prestigious east coast schools. (*Small is her perception; the Sacramento MSA has 2.5 million people, and the scene near the end where a college student from the east coast has never heard of it is rather ridiculous.)<\/p>\n

Ronan is marvelous in the title role, and I would be shocked if she weren\u2019t nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars and just about every other awards ceremony for this year. The script gives her the best material by a wide margin, including the quick emotional shifts of adolescence, and Ronan manages to inhabit this volatile world completely. Lady Bird chafes under any restraints, whether it\u2019s her Catholic high school, the social boundaries of teenaged life, or her domineering mother. Ronan manages to inform her character with the optimism that is part of Lady Bird\u2019s nature and allows her to succeed in spite of all of these obstacles without turning the part into a saccharine caricature.<\/p>\n

Her mother, played by Laurie Metcalf, is really problematic \u2013 and not because the character isn\u2019t realistic. She\u2019s controlling, narcissistic, overly critical, manipulative, even vindictive. She also reveals in a line that appears to be a throwaway that her own mother was \u201can abusive alcoholic.\u201d She herself is clearly a victim of trauma, and tries to control her environment \u2013 including her daughter \u2013 as an ineffective coping mechanism. She obsesses over clothes being put away, over Lady Bird using a second towel after her shower, over her grammar or spelling in a handwritten note, over anything that threatens the precise calibration of her life. The writing and the performance are strong and consistent enough that it\u2019s then hard to accept moments near the very end of the film where she tries to show her love for her daughter; they seem to come from a totally different character. Metcalf delivers the best performance of all of the actors playing adults in the film, but I found Tracy Letts, playing Lady Bird\u2019s father, more compelling because his character doesn’t have the improbable personality split of the mother.<\/p>\n

The adults, though, are the film\u2019s biggest problem. Lady Bird<\/em> has the Dawson\u2019s Creek<\/em> habit of reversing the kids and the grown-ups: The teenagers are the ones who have it all figured out and the adults are the ones still screwing things up or just generally not understanding. It\u2019s truer of the side characters, but it doesn\u2019t do the central character any favors to have her appear more insightful than every adult she encounters. The kids receive the best dialogue and the more accurate worldview \u2013 other than Kyle, one of the boys Lady Bird dates, who is busy fighting the battle of who could care less \u2013 and in many cases, like Lady Bird, her best friend Juliet, or Danny, another boy she dates, they\u2019re truly three-dimensional and believable, to the point where you could build new stories around any of them (although Juliet does fall into the Fat Best Friend<\/a> clich\u00e9).<\/p>\n

The movie soars on the performance and writing of its lead, enough to overcome some of the more hackneyed elements of her environment, and I think that\u2019s why it managed to set that Rotten Tomatoes record \u2013 even if you identify the flaws in the script, the core of the movie is so good that it more than mitigates the negatives. Watching this precocious but na\u00efve character navigate her last year of high school and deal with an emotionally abusive mother while stretching for an unlikely escape across the country is more than enough to make Lady Bird<\/em> worth recommending. I may just be outside the consensus that this is among the year\u2019s very best films. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Greta Gerwig\u2019s directorial debut, Lady Bird, has been in the news this week as it set a record on Rotten Tomatoes for the most positive (\u201cfresh\u201d) reviews received without a single negative (\u201crotten\u201d) one, 184 such reviews and counting. It\u2019s a coming-of-age story, incredibly well-acted throughout, with a number of truly hilarious moments in it, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[973,972,925,420,215],"class_list":["post-6187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2017-best-actress-nominees","tag-2017-best-picture-nominees","tag-2017-movies","tag-character-studies","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6187"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6188,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6187\/revisions\/6188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}