Call-and-response prayers in church are dumb, indoctrinating things when you’re 17. But once you leave them behind, you begin to miss them. Well, okay, you don’t miss the prayers themselves, but rather the people who stood beside you, reciting them halfheartedly and non-believingly and monotonously for years, making you feel (reluctantly) like you belonged to something, no matter how disappointing that something was. And once you hear them in another context—say, in a movie theater a decade after you graduated from a Catholic high school—you feel calm and welcome. That is, after first smooshing down the kneejerk urge to say along with the characters in church scenes, “For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever,” so as not to weird out the strangers sitting beside you in the theater.
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| Photo credit: Lady Bird/IMDb |
Lady Bird, the directorial debut of actress and screenwriter Greta Gerwig (Frances Ha), understands the role community plays in raising a kind and well-adjusted(ish) person. The story of Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson, a misanthropic high school senior at an all-girls Catholic school in Sacramento, California, during the 2002-’03 academic year, could be something much simpler and less enrapturing than it ultimately is. The film could go the easy route and elevate its protagonist’s quirks (she gave herself the nickname and everyone close to her begrudgingly, if intermittently, acquiesces to get her off their backs about it), toss in some “organized religion is bullshit” and “parents and teachers just don’t understand” posturing for flavor, and send it out into theaters.
But no, Gerwig, who also wrote the film, has warmer, more humanistic, and comforting things on her mind.
Villains don’t exist in young Lady Bird’s world. There are only people who make her mad from time to time, from incompatible boyfriends to nuns who think she can do better in school to her loving-but-critical mom (Laurie Metcalf, who gives a performance for the ages as a nurse who seemingly never works less than a double shift). Saoirse Ronan plays Lady Bird as a misfit with a chip on her shoulder, a kid literally from the wrong side of the tracks whose parents can’t afford the education they’re paying for. She’s a mess of guilt and gratitude, and also ingratitude, depending on her mood, which is never exactly sullen but rarely is it joyous, either. She’s a teenager, in other words, but not a caricature of one.
Heck, it’s not just Lady Bird: Everyone’s a stressed-out mess in this movie, barely holding onto their self-conception and their place in a harried, inadequate, wood-paneled neighborhood that needs at least one new layer of paint on every house, if only they could sock away a few bucks for a can of paint in between financial aid applications and layoff notices.
But there’s not a lot of blaming going around. That’s the key to Lady Bird’s good heartedness.
This loosely connected community is permissive. It’s admiring of its members’ best, most charitable traits and it’s forgiving of its members’ not-so-great moments. Every now and then, you’ll find that a nun you pulled a prank on thinks the prank was actually pretty funny and doesn’t think punishment is necessary. If you’re in the school play and your arts teacher has to go on leave for a health issue, it’s best to accept a junior varsity football coach doing his best as a stand-in as he excitedly draws stage directions like he’s John Madden. If your first time having sex ends with the “reassurance” that “so much disappointing sex” awaits you in the coming years, work on finding a partner who isn’t too into Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and obsessed with government surveillance. It’s not the best possible situation for anyone involved, and it’s definitely not what you wanted, but hey, living beats the alternative.
Hugs, which are a recurring visual motif for Gerwig and cinematographer Sam Levy, are not about absolution in this movie. The hugger has invariably been hurt by the hugged, and that hurt hasn’t gone away. It’s still there, and it will probably remain forever, but at the moment the hug occurs, what matters is moving past it and making peace with the disappointment the hugger feels. Grace is often conceived in movies as a thing as big as stars and galaxies, the type of thing you can only touch if you are mythic and godlike. But in reality, and in Lady Bird, grace is a hug and an acknowledgement that people are upsetting, and that’s okay.
Once you realize that, you’re prepared. You become more good natured.
And once you develop a good nature, you’re infinitely more prepared to handle an often unsatisfying world. You just need some flawed people around you who are willing to forgive a lot of disappointment.
Director: Greta Gerwig
Writer: Greta Gerwig
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Odeya Rush, Kathryn Newton, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts
Rating: 4.5/5 stars
Available in limited release now
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