Lady Bird hit UK cinemas six years ago next month. For Movie Monday, Faye Price looks at the flawed characters, teenage misadventures and the mother-daughter relationship in Greta Gerwig’s modern classic.
I stand by the view that you don’t need to be struggling through your teenage years to find the films depicting them instantly compelling. That period where change is especially constant, and even those who posture and pretend they know who they are and what they want
to do with their lives are desperately scrabbling around for answers like the rest of us. This is captured especially well in Greta Gerwig’s semi-autobiographical gem, Lady Bird (2017). Nominated for five Oscars, the film includes stirring performances by Saoirse Ronan (Lady Bird/Christine McPherson) and Laurie Metcalf (Marion McPherson) who each took home a Golden Globe for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress respectively. It is a vivacious, often hilarious film that offers a breath of fresh air on the teenage experience, as well as an exceptionally honest depiction of the fraught mother-daughter relationship.
It’s her senior year at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic High School in 2002, and Christine ‘Lady Bird’ McPherson has set her sights on a college on the east coast (‘where culture is’). She longs for sophistication, passion and experience, which aren’t forthcoming in sleepy
Sacramento, California, where Gerwig also spent her formative years. Utilising her ‘performative streak,’ Lady Bird and her best friend Julie (Beanie Feldstein) join the school’s theatre club. And so unfolds a year of intense exploration, of relationships, of the wider world, and of
herself. She also spends much of it locked in a near-constant battle with her well-meaning yet controlling mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf) who loves Lady Bird deeply, but often struggles to emotionally connect with her.
You don’t need to have seen ten minutes of the film to know that Lady Bird, like her mother, is a flawed character. She can be hedonistic and impulsive, with a slightly inflated self-image that she doesn’t always live up to. She wishes to pursue the arts at an east coast university, but struggles to maintain the work ethic needed to get her there. She is rebellious and has anarchistic intentions, but aside from an episode at an abortion assembly that results in a suspension, these intentions never make it past the talking stage. Yet she is still a fierce, bright young woman with artistic sensitivity, unshakeably driven in spite of the negative messages she receives regarding her academic abilities. She is also endearingly messy in the way that only teens and young adults can be, making new friends, ditching old ones, recklessly pranking teachers, and rejecting certain family values in the search for her own.
We can never pinpoint the exact moment a young adult matures, but in Lady Bird Gerwig expertly draws this moment out into the tumultuous process it really is. Lady Bird’s first romantic and sexual experiences with Danny and Kyle are fleeting, though with Danny at least there is some natural affinity. In her short-sighted desire for popularity she ditches longstanding friend Julie for the wealthy Jenna, whom she lies to about where she lives (‘on the wrong side of the tracks’) and the irritatingly pretentious Kyle, who she loses her virginity to.
Despite Lady Bird’s intentions, the latter two relationships are only ever surface level, and can’t replace what she had with Julie, her mother or even Danny. There is a particularly epiphanic moment in Kyle’s car towards the end of the film where he and their friends decide to ditch prom and, ‘go to Mike’s instead.’ Lady Bird realises how much she actually wants to go, and gets Kyle to drive her to Julie’s, one of the only real friends she has. It is here we first see Lady Bird begin to understand the value of true connection with people who love and understand her, rather than the potentially shallow connections that come from climbing the school’s social ladder.
Though Lady Bird is primarily about Lady Bird herself, the heart and soul of the film is that tenuous relationship between mother and daughter. Laurie Metcalf is spectacular where this is concerned; playing the overworked, slightly overbearing parent with tight-lipped realism and occasional wry humour. She repeatedly tells Lady Bird that, ‘we’re not rich people,’ and doesn’t hold back on informing her how much she is wasting the opportunities she has being given, particularly now that her father has lost his job and they are struggling financially more than ever.
The relationship between Lady Bird and her mother is a mass of contradictions, and this is one of the film’s most fascinating elements. They share a closeness, yet remain distant from one another. They want to connect, but don’t know how. They can be similar, but also couldn’t be
more diametrically opposed. Despite Lady Bird’s rebellious spirit, she is more reliant on her mother’s opinion of her than she realises. Which is why it is so heart-breaking watching her panicked, desperate attempts to engage her mother after Marion finds out about the financial
aid her father helped her set up for college behind her back, and stops speaking to Lady Bird as a result. We see the true disconnect between what Marion wants for her daughter and what Lady Bird envisions for herself. This alone strikes a chord, because how many parents have wanted something different for their child than what they themselves envision?
By the film’s end, Lady Bird has what she wanted; college on the east coast, and freedom. Her mother is too hurt and angry to say a proper goodbye at the airport, but finds herself in tears on the journey back and attempts in vain to catch her daughter before her flight takes off. We see Lady Bird wandering into a Church in New York after a drunken dorm party landed her in hospital the night before. She dials her parents number as she leaves, calling herself by her given name and therefore reclaiming her family as a central part of her identity.
Lady Bird leaves a long-lasting impression whether you are a mother, a daughter, both, or neither. It is a film about self-exploration, and giving loved ones that space to figure it all out themselves, which can sometimes mean letting them go. There is also huge emphasis on the
value we place on where we came from. Ironically, it is only after leaving Sacramento, the place she has shunned throughout the film, that Christine is able to be grateful to it, and to her family. It is this appreciation and newfound maturity that informs the voicemail she leaves for her mother: ‘…I wanted to tell you. I love you. Thank you. I’m… Thank you.’
Words by Faye Price
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