Lady Bird

Lady Bird is the story of a girl's senior year at a Catholic high school in 2002 and 2003.  Though her name is actually Christine, she introduces herself as Lady Bird.  This is a coming-of-age story that mostly focuses on the relationship with Lady Bird and her mother.

Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) is in full rebellion mode for most of the movie and usually playing the alpha male in her love life.  She courts the men who interest her and they are mostly indifferent lumps who don't protest at being her boyfriend.  Of course, perhaps she is finding men like her father who is also something of a lump.  At one point, Lady Bird's mother (Laurie Metcalf) starts explaining how her father is depressed and he is sitting silently in the room as this discussion takes place.  Even her brother Miguel - obviously adopted though that is never openly stated - works as a checker at a local grocery store despite having a mathematics degree from Berkley!  She lives in a world of passive or underachieving men.  She abandons her old clique - notably best friend Julie - and joins the 'popular' group.  She eventually regrets the move.  She also regrets surrendering her virginity to one of the lumps mere moments after the act.  She lies, cheats, and steals.  At her Catholic school, she laments that a pro-life speaker's mother didn't have the abortion and thus spare them from that school assembly.  Lady Bird offers nothing but contempt for her hometown, Sacramento.  Her fondest wish is to go to school on the East Coast.  By the end of the movie, she is attending college in NYC and realizes that she misses Sacramento.

 

This is obviously autobiographical for writer/director Greta Gerwig, who was born in Sacramento in 1983, attended a Catholic School, whose mother was a nurse, and attended college in New York.  Clearly some poetic license was included to spice up the story or maybe she squeezed several years worth of antics into a single year. 

 

Lady Bird herself is not a likeable character.  There is a combination of self-loathing and constant rebellion that makes it difficult to like her.  This speaks well of Ronan's ability to bring the character to life.  Her mother (Laurie Metcalf) is a far more sympathetic character.  Julie (Beanie Feldstein) is the only other character to be realized, a shy but talented girl that Lady Bird abandons for the popular kids only to reconsider later.

 

There are some SJW moments like Lady Bird's pro-abortion stance.  She sees a poster of Reagan at the house of her boyfriend's grandmother and he offers an embarrassed shrug.  Soon thereafter, we discover he is gay and is terrified of telling his Catholic, Republican family.  Another character is reading Howard Zinn's A Peoples History of the United States, a book that looks only at the warts of American history and laments that socialists and communists were suppressed.

 

Skip this one.