Lady Bird – Film Review

Lady Bird is a wonderful coming of age tale set back in the early 2000’s around this girl named Christine who goes by the alias of ‘Lady Bird’. She has a desire to leave her hometown of Sacramento, CA to go to college out of state. The film goes over the course of one year from the summer before Senior Year of High School to beginning of Freshman Year of College. Saoirse Ronan plays the titular character in a breakthrough performance that is surely to get her Oscar Nominated. As an Irish-American accent she can pull of a flawless American accent that is believable and slip into the role of Lady Bird.

Her relationship with her mother played by Laurie Metcalf is the heart of the film. Her relationship with her parents is a typical struggle but over the course of the film you don’t just see one side or a straightforward relationship — it’s very complex in that they have moments of happiness to anger and back at the drop of a hat like a natural mother daughter relationship is in real life. I did appreciate the attention they put on her family being a middle class / blue collar struggling typical American home that goes through life paycheck to paycheck. It felt very real and honest.

Greta Gerwig does a fantastic job bringing this story to the big screen in her first feature film that she wrote and directed. The length of the film is a standard 94 minutes long which feels naturally paced that you don’t feel that it is too long or brief. The passage of time is also well executed with the different holidays and natural High School events that happen over time.

I hate California, I want to go to the east coast. I want to go where culture is like, New York, or Connecticut or New Hampshire.

Her personal relationships with her best friend Julie and her two boyfriends over the course of the film were very genuinely executed. Both dynamic relationships that didn’t vilify either character but made the real people with real problems. Though the film is set in the early 2000’s this story could easily have been told in any decade. It is almost timeless which is the best situation you could have in a movie that it can apply to anyone at anytime. The few things that ground this in that time period is the music choices in the film and the lack of modern technology (cellphones.)

Though I didn’t find the film a masterpiece it doesn’t mean it’s a great coming of age film — which it is! It is a film I would say is a great parent and child tool to showcase both sides of the coin and to showcase that you have to lose someone in order to know you love them or you’ve been loved.

8.5/10