Greta Gerwig (2017)
Christmases in the place we grew up stay with most of us – certainly with Greta Gerwig. In Frances Ha (2012), which she co-wrote with Noah Baumbach and starred in, the eponymous Frances briefly returns from New York City to her family home in Sacramento to spend Christmas with her parents – who are played by Gerwig’s own parents. Their daughter’s debut as a solo writer-director[1] includes a family scene around the Christmas tree. Gerwig uses as an epigraph a quote from another Sacramento native, Joan Didion: ‘Anyone who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento’. Lady Bird – the most thoroughly enjoyable American film of 2017 – explores Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan)’s relationships with classmates, boyfriends, her adopted brother Miguel (Jordan Rodrigues), her father Larry (Tracy Letts) and, especially, her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf). Greta Gerwig has said that nothing in Lady Bird ‘literally happened in my life, but it has a core of truth that resonates with what I know’. The story, set in 2002-03, spans Christine’s final year in Catholic high school in Sacramento and ends with her arrival in NYC to start college there. Gerwig, born in 1983, followed a similar educational path, to Barnard College.
Just as the film is and isn’t autobiographical, so ‘Lady Bird’ is and isn’t Christine’s given name. (I’ll alternate between these two names throughout.) ‘Why is it in quotes?’ asks Father Leviatch (Stephen McKinlay Henderson), looking at the list of students auditioning for the autumn musical (which involves the boys’ Catholic high school as well as the girls’). ‘I gave it to myself’, explains Lady Bird, ‘it’s given to me by me’. She expects her parents, as well as her friends, to respect her choice. The adopted name functions as an expression of Christine’s desire to put distance between herself and her roots. She’s so dissatisfied with her lot that she complains even about the year she’s living in: the only decent thing about 2002 ‘is that it’s a palindrome’. She wants to go east, to an Ivy League institution ‘in a city with culture’, but she’s an erratic student who’ll struggle to get scholarship funding and her family isn’t well off. Marion works long hours as a psychiatric nurse at the local hospital. Larry’s IT firm is laying people off. Miguel graduated from Berkeley but he and his girlfriend Shelly (Marielle Scott), who’s also part of the McPherson household, are stuck in supermarket jobs.
Lady Bird’s ideas above her station extend to coveting a blue mansion that she sees every day on her school journey but is alluringly inaccessible. The house turns out to be owned by the grandmother of Danny O’Neill (Lucas Hedges); he’s the main reason why Lady Bird stays in the cast for the musical , even though she’s only in the chorus. She and Danny start going out together. To her delight and her mother’s acute disappointment, Lady Bird spends her last Thanksgiving before college as a dinner guest at the blue mansion. Though they chastely kiss and lie side by side on the grass, gazing up at a starry sky, the relationship between Lady Bird and the charming, well-mannered Danny doesn’t get seriously physical. ‘I respect you too much for that’, he assures her. She believes it until she catches him in a clinch with another boy. She then switches her attention to Kyle Scheible (Timothée Chalamet): he’s at the same school as Danny but plays in a rock band and, darkly laconic, looks and sounds vaguely dangerous to know. Kyle nevertheless tells Christine that he is, like her, a virgin. When they’ve had sex for the first time, he denies he said this: he’s even lost exact count of his previous partners. Lady Bird is upset and complains that she wanted their mutual deflowering to be ‘special’. ‘Why?’ asks Kyle, ‘You’re going to have so much unspecial sex in your life’.
There’s also a sharp contrast between the two girls Lady Bird is special friends with in the course of the story – overweight, ungainly Julianne ‘Julie’ Steffans (Beanie Feldstein) and the very pretty, popular Jenna Walton (Odeya Rush). These two – Julie particularly – are good examples of how far down the cast Gerwig has written substantial characters. Julie is never as dumb as she looks, from the moment that Christine objects she’s written ‘Julie’ in inverted commas on the auditions list, just as Christine has written ‘Lady Bird’, when ‘it’s not the same’. ‘I think it is,’ her friend murmurs. Julie is also an A-grade maths student and gets the lead female role opposite Danny in the musical (Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along). Neither of those things makes it any less painful for her after the show is over. The maths teacher (Jake McDorman) she has a crush on, and who singles her out for special sotto voce praise in the classroom, congratulates Julie on her performance but his baffled voice gives away his surprise (‘You were so good …’) He then quickly takes his leave: he and his pregnant wife (Rebecca Light) must be getting home. Jenna replaces Julie as Lady Bird’s best friend: she already knows Kyle, is reprimanded by Sister Sarah (Lois Smith), the school principal, for wearing too short a skirt, and appeals to Lady Bird as a glamorous subversive. The pair decorate Sister Sarah’s car with a ‘Just Married to Jesus’ notice. Yet Jenna disappoints Lady Bird by being content to stay in Sacramento.
Understandable secrets and lies – some bigger and more hurtful than others – accumulate. To impress Jenna, Lady Bird pretends she lives in the blue mansion. Danny hasn’t come out yet to his parents. Christine asks her father to sign a financial-aid application for her college studies and not to tell her mother about this, or that she’s applying to out-of-state universities. He acquiesces: trying to keep the peace between his wife and daughter is Larry McPherson’s main domestic role (Marion does all the housework). His lifelong battle with depression is a secret too, until he loses his job and Marion reveals both things to Lady Bird at once; a shock for a teenage girl who saw her father as both a soft touch and a tower of strength. The combative mother-daughter relationship at the heart of the film is wholly persuasive. Christine and Marion McPherson usually argue but you never doubt how important they are to each other (just like the outstanding family disputants of 2016, Lee and Patrick Chandler in Manchester by the Sea). Greta Gerwig’s dialogue is sustainedly witty and acute but her largest achievement in Lady Bird may be her writing of Marion, whose prickly, well-meaning honesty means she’ll almost always say the wrong thing to her daughter.
The cast includes more big names than it did when filming began in the late summer of 2016. Greta Gerwig had seen Lucas Hedges in Manchester by the Sea but the film wasn’t yet in cinemas. Timothée Chalamet had completed work on Call Me by Your Name but its theatrical release was more than a year away. Hedges and Chalamet were nineteen and twenty respectively at the time they made Lady Bird. Saoirse Ronan, although relatively well established, was still only twenty-two (pale and slender, and skilfully dressed, she passes easily for the seventeen-year-old she’s meant to be). Ronan is so reliably good that you already take her command for granted. The role of headstrong, impulsive Christine doesn’t allow her the emotional and expressive range that Eilis in Brooklyn did – the character here is smaller scale and predominantly verbal – but she’s completely convincing in it. Though the supporting players are exceptional, Ronan holds the film together. Laurie Metcalf is admirable as the oppressed, tenacious Marion. Her daughter asks, ‘When do you think is a good time to have sex?’; Marion instantly and quietly says, half to herself, ‘You’re having sex’. This is part of a bathroom conversation that begins when Marion demands to be let in; Lady Bird opens the door with one towel covering her body and another as a turban; her mother asks if she really needs both towels. Complaining about that while containing her feelings about her daughter’s sex life is typical of Marion. Laurie Metcalf captures beautifully throughout how much she feels and thinks beyond what she says. Jordan Rodrigues can’t do a lot with the thin role of Miguel but Tracy Letts has never been as warm and natural as he is as Larry.
Those adjectives apply even more to Lucas Hedges, which makes the revelation that Danny has been playing a part offstage as well as in the school drama society more poignant. Much as I love Manchester by the Sea, it’s good after that film and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri to see this terrific young actor getting the chance to smile as much as he does here, even if Danny is concealing anxieties. Hedges is set to appear in lead roles before the end of 2018 (and this viewer can hardly wait); Timothée Chalamet, of course, has already graduated to them. He’s drily amusing as Kyle, though it’s often hard to make out what he’s saying. Beanie Feldstein, emotionally fine-tuned as Julie, shows that she also shares her elder brother Jonah Hill’s comic flair. At the veteran end of the cast, Lois Smith and Stephen McKinlay Henderson are excellent value. Smith (for whom it’s been quite a year, with Marjorie Prime too) does full justice to Sister Sarah, another character with more facets than you might expect. Henderson registers strongly as Father Leviatch, which makes his absence in the film’s later stages more noticeable. The genially, apparently confident director of the musical, Leviatch is one of several male characters in Lady Bird with a troubled mind. In an acting class, he asks the students to feel themselves into authentic crying but beats them all to tears. At the end of the well-received performance of Merrily We Roll Along, he laments that the audience ‘didn’t understand it’. The last we see of Leviatch, he’s one of Marion’s patients at the hospital.
As well as the autumn musical, the Catholic schools join forces for a spring play – on this occasion, The Tempest. Danny is Prospero but Lady Bird has dropped out of the group. Julie’s assurance that Miss Patty (Marietta DePrima), the assistant director, had assigned Christine a role triggers a bizarrely wide-ranging spat:
Christine: What role?
Julie: The Tempest.
Christine: There is no role of the Tempest!
Julie: It is the titular role!
Christine: No! It’s a made-up thing so we all can participate.
Julie: You can’t do anything unless you’re the centre of attention, can you?
Christine: Yeah, well you know, your mom’s tits, they’re fake! Totally fake!
Julie: She made one bad decision at nineteen!
Christine: Two bad decisions!
One of the other priests, Father Walther (Bob Stephenson), replaces Father Leviatch to take charge of The Tempest. Walther is usually a sports coach and directs for the stage accordingly. The broad comedy of this, though I enjoyed it, is out of kilter with most of Lady Bird – so is a bit where Miguel and the now-unemployed Larry find themselves in competition for the same job. Gerwig is much more herself in the sequence in which Lady Bird’s class gets a talk on abortion from a woman (Bayne Gibby) who reveals that her own mother was a teenage unmarried mother. The exchange that follows culminates in Christine’s truly shocking ‘Listen, if your mother had had the abortion, we wouldn’t have to sit through this stupid assembly!’ – an expression of her desire to shock and her genuine frustration. This whole scene is grippingly unpredictable.
Lady Bird is episodic but Mark Cousins is right to say that ‘lots of small, conversational, mostly static scenes combine into something with richness and insight’. (Cousins compares this effect with that of Ozu films.) Although she concentrates on well-realised individuals, Gerwig, in dramedising high-school rituals and recognisable family conflicts, creates a larger cultural picture. The meaning of the heroine’s self-given name is never explained but the direction the story takes evokes the possibly oxymoronic injunction to the nursery rhyme ladybird to ‘fly away home’. Spreading her wings and going to New York completes Christine’s realisation there’s no place like home (and she reverts to the name her parents gave her). Perhaps inevitably, in view of the style of what’s gone before, Gerwig strains to reach this conclusion. You first sense the strain when Lady Bird, driving with Kyle, Jenna and Jenna’s boyfriend to the senior prom, asks to get out of the car after learning the other three are heading for a party elsewhere. She goes to Julie’s home instead; the two ex-friends are swiftly reconciled and go together to the prom.
When she learns that Christine, with Larry’s help, has gone behind her back and is off to New York, Marion is distraught and angry. She tries writing a letter to Christine to express her true feelings but her several attempts turn into scrunched-up balls of paper. On arrival in New York, Christine opens an envelope from her father, containing these drafts (straightened out). When Larry asks his daughter not to let her mother know about these, it’s a lovely culmination of the keeping-secrets motif (and, as Sally said, a refreshingly imaginative twist on the law of television drama that any secret note thrown in the waste bin is bound to be retrieved). Otherwise, Lady Bird’s last section in New York is wobbly. A sequence in which Christine gets drunk and is hospitalised is, uniquely in this film, overlong. The next morning it’s Sunday; discharged from hospital, Christine hears bells and heads to a Catholic church, where she listens affectionately to the service. Back outside, she phones home and leaves a voicemail for her parents – but ‘mostly for Mom’. It’s quite a long message: this ending might have rung truer to what’s gone before if the answerphone tape had run out just as Christine delivered her concluding ‘I love you’. In the cinema, I cursed under my breath that, right at the end, Greta Gerwig had succumbed to feelgood imperative and forced things. In retrospect, the finale of Lady Bird matters much less. You remember all the good things about the film and they are legion.
23 February 2018
[1] She co-directed Nights and Weekends (2008) with Joe Swanberg.
