The Fierce Lady
Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) is someone cursed with that familiar, often painful, gift of youth—absolute certainty. She feels everything strongly, expresses her opinions loudly, and both wounds and charms the people around her without meaning to. On the brink of adulthood, she’s resolute enough about her desire to go to college on the East Coast (far from her home of Sacramento) that she tosses herself out of a moving car when her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf) tries to dismiss her ambitions. Another movie might frame that moment as frightening or foolish, but Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird celebrates Christine’s teenage will, no matter how extreme it can sometimes be.
Gerwig, making her solo directing debut (she previously collaborated on the 2008 mumblecore movie Nights and Weekends with Joe Swanberg), injects Lady Bird with the kind of vivacious energy that suffused the films she co-wrote with the director Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha and Mistress America). Lady Bird is frequently laugh-out-loud funny but never short on pathos. Though small in scale (and only 93 minutes long), it still manages to cram in the entirety of Christine’s senior year and beyond. The film is also a delightful paean to Sacramento, Gerwig’s hometown, distilling just how simultaneously claustrophobic and comforting the places we come from can be, especially when we’re on the verge of fleeing them.
But Lady Bird is undeniably Ronan’s show, and the twice-Oscar-nominated Irish actress tackles Christine’s torrents of dialogue and endless zeal with poise. Lady Bird wouldn’t work if the teenager at its center weren’t utterly lovable, and Ronan really is, making Christine’s flaws as endearing as her warmth and vulnerability. Her mistakes are all the more winning because the audience can spot trouble a mile away, as it might with her two romantic interests (Lucas Hedges as an adorable theater kid and Timothée Chalamet as a leather jacket–wearing anarchist) or her two closest friends (the sweetly dorky Beanie Feldstein and the imperiously aloof Odeya Rush).
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