“You think about no one but yourself!” mom snaps at her daughter, the willful high school senior who dubbed herself “Lady Bird.”
“I want to go where culture is!” the girl shoots back.
The argument comes near the end of a road trip to check out a nearby college. Lady Bird dreams of going to New York—or at least New Hampshire, “where writers live in the woods.” Although mom reminds her that California’s in-state tuition is all they can afford, Lady Bird remains determined to escape Sacramento, which she discounts as “the Midwest of California.” With a flair for drama, she ends the discussion by hurling herself from the moving car, breaking her arm.
Written and directed by Greta Gerwig, still better known for her screen roles in To Rome With Love and 20th Century Women, Lady Bird is an emotionally autobiographical comedy, stiffened by a few shots of drama, of a creative girl in the early steps of finding her way. Saoirse Ronan is a perfect picture of a teenager desperate to invent herself, starting with her goofy moniker and leading through false stories of her background. The comedy dances on the realization that the life she chaffs at isn’t so bad. Her Roman Catholic school (her parents strain to pay tuition) is marked by rote religiosity but also by a benign faculty (the nuns elude stereotypes). She is one of the poorest kids in a student body drawn mostly from the upper-middle class but finds friendship with an overweight girl even lower than her on the economic ladder. Although mom (Laurie Metcalf) subjects her to platitudes of guilt, she is a big-hearted woman who adopted a pair of Hispanic kids from troubled backgrounds.
Lady Bird is acutely aware of economic distinctions and the prickly vulnerability of a lower-middle class increasingly fearful of slipping downhill. Dad is threatened by lay-offs and mom works a double shift to make ends meet. Lady Bird (and her mom) dream of living in the big houses they can only walk past—or tour when up for sale as if they would ever be able to make an offer. Invited to Thanksgiving by a boyfriend who lives in one of those homes, she is put to work folding napkins on the dining room table like a Victorian servant girl.
The awkwardness of discovering the towering sensation of love, the physical exploration of sex with all the emotional confusion, is well accounted for in many sweet and funny scenes. Lady Bird’s cultural snobbery is a defense against her fear of sinking into unrecognized mediocrity. She has vague dreams that haven’t coalesced into a plan beyond getting accepted at a good college far away.
Working from a well-paced screenplay with many digressions but never a wasted moment, Lady Bird is brought to life by a cast that appears fully engaged in every nuance. The story is set in 2002, a fact whose major resonance is the scarcity of hand-held devices. No one sits with anyone else furiously texting. They have to talk.
