Butler's Cinema Scene

Saoirse Ronan

“LADY BIRD” My rating: B+ 

93 minutes | MPAA rating: R

That Saoirse Ronan gives an Oscar-worthy performance in “Lady Bird” is expected. She is, after all, perhaps the greatest actress of her young generation. (Exhibit One: “Brooklyn.”)

What’s really surprising about this funny/furious coming-of-age yarn is the voice behind the camera.  “Lady Bird” is the first feature soley written and directed by Greta Gerwig, the actress known as indie filmdom’s go-to gal for slightly ditzy heroines (“Greenberg,” “Frances Ha,” “Mistress America”).

Gerwig gives us not only a first-rate dramedy about a young woman’s growth from cranky teen to independent woman, but also the most incendiary mother/daughter movie relationship since “Terms of Endearment.”

Combining savage wordplay, satiric insights into adolescent life and a genuine sense of family dynamics, “Lady Bird” is simultaneously familiar and fiercely original.

Christine (Saoirse Ronan) is a high school senior (the year is 2002) and  pissed off about nearly everything. Her general dissatisfaction may be behind her decision to change her name to Lady Bird…or to at least demand that her parents, friends and teachers call her  that. A new name may lead to a new life, right?

In the film’s first scene Lady Bird and her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf) are reduced to tears while driving down the highway listening to a book tape of The Grapes of Wrath.  It’s a rare moment when mom and daughter are on the same page; seconds later Lady Bird’s temper flares and she impulsively bails from the moving car. (She will spend much of the movie with a cast on one hand.)

The source of the argument is college.  The two are returning from a scouting trip to regional universities, but Lady Bird has her heart set on something back east, a place with “real culture, like New York…or Connecticut.” Marion, a glum financial harpie, warns that there isn’t any money for an Ivy League education.  A small state college the next town over will have to do.

This is the film’s central conflict: a smart, ambitious and somewhat spoiled adolescent versus her penny-pinching, essentially joyless parent.  (Lady Bird’s dad, played by Tracy Letts, is a laid-back  noncombatant who offers moral support to both mother and daughter but not much else, having been downsized from his tech job.)

Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf

Around this domestic battlefield Gerwig provides amusing and insightful glimpses of Lady Bird’s life at a Catholic high school. Our girl assumes the role of sniping anti-social outsider, contemptuous of the nuns who run the place (the great Lois Smith shines as an administrator who is far more hip and attuned to Lady Bird’s comic angst than one would suspect) and of the various cliques that run the joint.

Lady Bird’s only close friend is the plump theater geek Julie (Beanie Feldstein, Jonah Hill’s little sister). Desperate to burnish her resume, Lady Bird auditions for the fall musical and is cast in the chorus of Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along.”

Not only does she find herself caught up in the camaraderie of thespian dweebdom, but she falls hard for the show’s leading man, rich kid Danny (“Manchester by the Sea’s Lucas Hedges). It’s a relationship doomed to failure, though not for the reasons you’d expect.

On the rebound she is drawn to the aloof guitarist for a local rock band (Timothee Chalet) to whom she gives up her virginity.

And, in a desperate grasp at social acceptance, she throws over the loyal Julie to court the friendship of the beautiful, wealthy Jenna (Odeya Rush).

There’s serious stuff percolating throughout Gerwig’s screenplay, but it’s leavened by amusing observations.  Kansas City native Stephen Henderson is  both a hoot and a bit sad as the needy priest in charge of the drama department.  When he has a breakdown he’s replaced by the imminently unqualified football coach (Bob Stephenson), who blocks out stage movements with X’s and O’s on a chalk board — basically he’s designing pass patterns.

But the smoldering heart of “Lady Bird” is the child/parent relationship, and Metcalf is simultaneously maddening and heart-wrenching.  Her Marion works double shifts as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital, and the specter of her family’s economic collapse has wrung most of the joy from her life. She’s crabby and demanding and contrary (after finally finding a suitable prom dress for Lady Bird, Marion jinxes the deal by criticizing the color), but not for one moment do we doubt her immense love for her daughter.

It’s a marvelously complex role brilliantly played…expect both women to be nominated for Oscars.

The situations and emotions roiling through “Lady Bird” are so real one can only assume that many were pulled from Gerwig’s own past.  Indeed, the story is set in Sacramento, where Gerwig grew up.

The results are both intimate and universal.

| Robert W. Butler