Have to admit that taking on actress-turned-filmmaker Greta Gerwig's second feature gave me pause. Not my favorite genre (the bildungsroman) nor was the milieu familiar (Sacramento, California)--tempted to throw up my hands say 'not my cup of tea!' and leave it at that.
Doesn't help that the movie starts with a jawdropper: Christine (Saoirse Ronan)--who decides to call herself 'Lady Bird' because that's what teens apparently do--in a car with mother Marion (the wonderfully wry Laurie Metcalf) listening to an audiocassette of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Almost immediately after wiping away their tears they have a violent quarrel on the subject of college ("You can't get into those schools anyway." "Mom!" "You can't even pass your driver's test.")--so violent Christine flings herself out of the still-moving vehicle, just to get away from her relentlessly monotone mother.
Some good things here: as Gerwig herself points out in an informal interview in the NPR quiz show Wait Wait Don't Tell Me mothers and daughters are capable of turning on an emotional dime--sniff mournfully over a passage of Steinbeck one minute go at each other's throat like a pair of wolverines the next, end the scene behaving perfectly fine, as if nothing had happened.
Jumping out of a moving car does raise the bar considerably. One thinks of Christine as not just emotionally volatile but physically fearless, not just able to act spontaneously but stupidly, self-destructively, in total mercy to one's impulses.
Did Christine learn from the incident? She sports a wrist cast for most of the picture and you wait for her to swing the plaster club down hard on someone's cranium, possibly--particularly--her mother's, to at least do something as unpredictable as in that opening scene. Expectation established, expectation dashed.
And...that's it really. Gerwig's debut solo feature (she had co-directed Nights and Weekends with Joe Swanberg which I haven't seen) is a modest picture full of modest pleasures--carefully observed if not particularly probing, some poignant passages, some lovely supporting performances (arguably the entire cast is supporting, the characters they play almost exclusively seen--especially Metcalf's unyielding mother--through Christine's eyes).
Gerwig constructs a series of vignettes--of Christine seeking social status, seeking a relationship with a boy, seeking to lose her virginity (basically most of the standard tropes found in a teenage girl comedy)--and caps the movie with a revisit to the opening conflict (the question of college) and Marion's non-confrontation with Christine on the issue. Having written the script herself Gerwig seems to know how to write sharp dialogue, deliver a nice little punchline, sustain the overall pace, transition to the next vignette.
Maybe what's missing is the sense of something at stake--a crisis or realization or person that profoundly changes Christine's life. O we see changes--Christine does eventually rise in status, does form relationships, does (I suppose I ought to add a warning about plot twists but is there really a point?) lose her virginity--but there's also the sense of a benign intelligence at work smoothing things over, making everything turn out pretty much all right. Even the crisis involving Marion--arguably the picture's dramatic high--ends with a last-minute turnaround and some studious anticlimactic bridge-building between family members (the image late in the picture of Christine placing a long-distance call has the feel of an AT&T commercial).
Catholic girls gone wild; has this been attempted before on the big screen? Ida Lupino's The Trouble with Angels--about Catholic students (led by Hayley Mills) under the watchful eye of Rosalind Russell as Mother Superior--is on the surface even more irritatingly wholesome and sitcom-ish than Gerwig's indie production; cigarettes may be lit (and at one point cigars) but virginity is never at any moment in danger of being lost. The film (based on the novel Life with Mother Superior by June Trahey, about her experiences in a Catholic school) features the kind of narrative density and character detail that fleshes out a story far more convincingly than clever vignettes. Helps that Lupino is a veteran filmmaker able to work within different genres (noir thriller, feminist drama, bildungsroman comedy) to create responses to her characters that change over the course of the narrative.
Interesting that Lupino directed this film towards the end of her career (she'd continue directing but in television), Gerwig nearer the beginning of hers. Gerwig seems to operate under the imperative to 'write (and direct) what you know' choosing semi-autobiographical material (she's not Catholic, but did go to a Catholic high school). Lupino took someone's real-life experiences and (with a filmmaker's eye developed over long experience) shaped it to deliver genuine dramatic force: in this film a life-changing decision is made involving actual sacrifice, and you can't help but know it.
First published in Businessworld 3.2.18
1 comment:
Jaxon Bieber had a few nice things to say. Here they are sans spammy links.
I was surprised at how much I liked this lovely film. I like that it doesn't spoon feed the audience by trying to explain everything, tie everything in a neat package, or try to manipulate you to feel a certain way about a character. All the acting is superb, but Laurie Metcalf is a stand out. I appreciate the script and directing - it isn't slick and overproduced, but it's also not choppy and confusing. it felt like it duplicated a teenager's sense of things.
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