Review: Lady Bird

Lady Bird (15)

USA 2017  94 mins  Dir: Greta Gerwig Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts, Lucas Hedges, Timothée Chalamet

Indie queen and former mumblecore muse Greta Gerwig’s Oscar nominated, semi-autobiographical directorial debut arrives on these shores laden down with the kind of extravagant praise that would crush any coming-of-age story, no matter how truthful or richly observed. Approach it with suitably recalibrated expectations however, and Lady Bird does indeed prove to be a frank, funny and very superior contribution to this over-stuffed genre, buoyed by a magnificent performance from the always-excellent Saoirse Ronan. If you found the likes of Gerwig’s lauded 2012 collaboration with long-term partner Noah Baumbach Frances Ha a tad too navel-gazey and self-indulgent, rest assured that there’s no such taint here; nor does the film suffer from that default over-written adolescent outsider smugness in which such comedy-dramas generally trade.

We meet Christine MacPherson (Ronan) bonding and then enjoying a furious row with her mother Marion (Metcalf), at the conclusion of which she hurls herself out of their speeding car. She pays the price for her impulsiveness by sporting a wrist cast for much of the rest of the film. It’s 2002 and we’re in unglamorous Sacramento (“like the mid-west of California”), where the recession is biting hard. Precocious, moderately rebellious teen Christine, who insists on being called Lady Bird (“It’s a given name – given to me by me,” she asserts when this affectation is challenged), also has an authentically strained relationship with most of the rest of her family, apart from recently downsized, kindly sad-sack dad Larry (Letts). At the local Catholic high-school, she clashes with the nuns and is scorned by the popular rich kids, such is the shame of living literally on the wrong side of the tracks. Little wonder the poor girl is so eager to flee the serial disappointments plaguing her miserable, unfair smalltown life and win a place at an East Coast liberal arts college, alongside the aesthetes and sophisticates with whom she feels she belongs. Trouble is that even though New York colleges are rumoured to take just about anyone, such is their post-9/11 unpopularity, Lady Bird’s grades simply aren’t good enough.

Drawing heavily on her own background, Gerwig gifts talented Saoirse Ronan a wonderfully written, superbly calibrated role as the central sparky, awkward, solipsistic, dissembling, impressionable, combative and occasionally insufferable puddle of hormones – an authentic teenager, in other words. Sporting dyed hair and acne, slightly built Ronan brings out the vulnerability beneath her character’s veneer of self-assurance and defiance as Lady Bird yearns for the womanhood she is not yet emotionally equipped to handle – not least in her romantic adventures with nice thespian kid Danny (Hedges, who was Oscar nominated for his performance in Manchester by the Sea) and sulky conspiracy theorist poseur rocker Kyle (a hilarious turn by actor-of-the-moment Chalamet, Oscar nominated for Call Me By Your Name), a middle-class wannabe iconoclast who asserts solemnly that “I’m trying not to participate in our economy”.

Gerwig treats all her characters warmly, from the nun who has to deal with the protagonist’s outbursts and pranks to matriarch Marion, who infuriates Lady Bird with her refusal to indulge the teen’s dreams but works hard to hold the family together and is more like her daughter than either of them is prepared to admit. Although the director’s screenplay is a tad episodic and her story hardly breaks any new ground, there’s none of the wretched tweeness, forced quirkiness or unearned superiority that makes modern ‘indie’ as lazy and formulaic a brand in film as it has long been in music. Only occasionally does it slip into broad crowd-pleasing mode, but Lady Bird’s disruption of an anti-abortion lecture is such a doozy that it’s hard to resist the temptation to stand up and applaud.