[9.3/10] Escape followed by appreciation. Longing that leads to wistfulness. Rebellion that gives way to gratitude. It’s a familiar trajectory that most teenagers experience at some point. Young adulthood is a time of self-discovery, where kids like Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson try on different personas, test their boundaries, and yearn for something more, only to gradually learn to appreciate the support, security, and good fortune that gave them the leeway to do that sort of experimenting in the first place.
*Lady Bird* is about the relatable urge to stretch your wings, but also the realization of how comfortable and arduously-constructed the nest you’re leaving turns out to be, and how easy it is to take that for granted.
While that’s done well -- extraordinarily well in fact -- it’s not necessarily a new story. The American Teenager has been a subject of fascination for the page and the screen for ages, and although there’s a truth to how *Lady Bird* writer-director Greta Gerwig tells this story that makes it a cut above other films in the same genre, at a base level its rhythms are familiar. That’s part of what makes the movie so instantly and easily resonant.
What’s less familiar is the way it balances out Lady Bird’s youthful exploration and realization of how lucky she is, with the sense of hardship for her mother in the way she and her family are just barely scraping by and her thankless effort to try to give her children the best life she possible can, only to see her daughter reject that as an imposition and want for something she’s not sure she can provide.
Marion McPherson (Lady Bird’s mom) is not the most instantly lovable character. She isn’t the fun parent. She’s the “tells you what to do” parent. She can be passive aggressive in her put downs and blunt in her assessments of her daughter. But as the pseudo daughter-in-law she took-in tells Lady Bird, Mrs. McPherson has a big heart. And it’s a heart that causes her to lash out when her daughter, explicitly or implicitly, doesn't seem to appreciate what she’s been given, but also one that’s quietly wounded by that obliviousness in equal measure.
The push and pull between them is the core of the film. Neither Mrs. McPherson nor Lady Bird fully understand one another. Neither fits well into what the other is going through in the tumultuous, eventful year in the life of the McPhersons that the film covers. But both of them eventually feel the love and loss that sharpens into focus when a child leaves home and goes out into the world, when what’s suddenly absent becomes more conspicuous.
That’s the backbone of the film. Lady Bird yearns for something more, whether it’s freedom or the approval of the cool kids or the other talismans of adulthood she labors after. Then she gets them, in some form or fashion, only to realize how fortunate she is and was to have the thing she so readily abandoned and didn’t fully understand or appreciate in favor of something much hollower or uncertain.
It’s a film infused with notions of class, while building that theme into the world of the main character rather than seizing on it directly. Lady Bird and her mom shop for a prom dress at Thrift Town. Her father loses his job and then runs into his own son at a job interview. Lady Bird lies about where she lives and marvels at the dream home that belongs to her boyfriend’s grandmother. No one ever comes out and says that there’s shame and judgment tied to the McPherson’s socioeconomic status, just like that shame and judgment is so rarely expressed explicitly in real life, but just like in real life, that sense emerges in subtle ways that color the lives of the people experiencing it.
That comes partly from the sharp composition and editing in the film. There are quick cuts between the houses Lady Bird passes near her neighborhood on her walk to school and the much more stately manors that provide the backdrop as she gets closer to her destination, showing the difference between where she’s from and where she’s headed. A brief stare at a tussle-haired boy in a band at a house party foreshadows wandering eyes and the sort of “change yourself for some cute member of the opposite sex” routine almost everyone experience. And a top-down shop of Lady Bird and her best friend singing along to early 00’s jam rock ballads is silly and sympathetic in equal measure with the frank view the camera provides.
True to that balance, despite its serious, emotional themes, *Lady Bird* is an uproariously funny movie. It’s humor is observational and specific, getting the sincerity and severity of young adulthood just right, managing to laugh both at Lady Bird and with her. The film captures the naive certainty and hell-raising impulses of youth with perfection, creating recognizable scenes of playing it cool and trying too hard and the other strange contours of the high school experience.
It’s that realness that also gives *Lady Bird* its punch on the other side of that humor. When Lady Bird’s theater teacher remarks on the reception of their school play, “They didn’t understand it,” with an affronted resignation, it’s a hilarious moment of the contrast between how seriously he takes his art and the limited audience of a high school production. And yet when the same teacher inadvertently wins his own “who can cry first” contest for his young actors, or opens up about his depression to Mrs. McPherson, it reveals the deeper well of sadness and pain beyond the surface level that Lady Bird sees.
It’s a repeated motif in the film. Even the characters who seem like one-off gags, there only to delight or bemuse the movie’s teenaged denizens, have moments to show they’re more than just the small slice of their being that Lady Bird perceives or cares about. She realizes her friends, her mother, her life, are much much more than she ever gave any of them credit for, and her trials and travails through puppy love and popularity eventually show that what she thought she wanted instead was only what she saw on the surface, and she finds much much less beneath that thin veneer.
So while Lady Bird finds herself feeling stifled by her catholic school, she ends up finding solace in the tones and architectural embrace of a church. While she aims to remake herself as something new and different, she finds herself wanting the things she used to have and used to be right when her life is on the verge of irrevocably changing. And when she’s free of her mother’s watchful eye and occasionally harsh critiques, she comes to appreciate the deep care behind the sharp elbows, the affectionate soul beyond the hard edges, and how much Mrs. McPherson gave to her daughter, literally and figuratively.
The path from youth to adulthood is full of bumps in the road, wrong turns, and swerves away from the wrong direction. But it’s also full of growing realizations, that the things you took for granted or didn’t understand at the time may be the things you cherish the most, including the people you love and who, however fleetingly and ruefully, you once resented.
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