Lady Bird is the debut
film from awkward performing independent actor Greta Gerwig, writing and
directing a realistically well-meaning dramedy about a girl who calls herself
Lady Bird played by Saoirse Ronan, attending her last year of High School
before she goes off to college.
Greta Gerwig who started her film writing career with Frances Ha, does a great job at
portraying the scattered desperation of a seventeen-year-old eager live a life
other than her own, by using cut away scenes to display the harshness of
reality and lingering shots to display the precious realizations of western
society. These are coupled with the always whimsical and always emotionally
effective musical score of Jon Brion. Whose music immediately elevates Lady Bird from being a typically independent
film about a depressed white teenage, by breathing humanity into the films
characters and locations yet all the while underlining the unfortunate results
of a regrettable decision. Lady Bird is
also elevated by a poignant script highlighting the tension of homophobia,
racism, sexism, classism and war of the early 2000s that even more so existed
back then. Saoirse Ronan effortless sells the desperate belonging and stubborn
unawareness of Lady Bird and easily
displays her pain with a quiet removed quality. Laurie Metcalf does an equally
fantastic job as Lady Bird’s mother,
just as stubborn and unaware, both actors brilliantly portraying the functioning
of a dysfunctional passive aggressive mother/daughter relationship with a true
to life script.
Lady Bird is an
important watch and an enjoyable one as well, though slighted by it’s undetailed
portrayal of it’s time period of the early 2000s, and of it’s characters
personal interests hovering through the film, Lady Bird still accurately portrays the oppression of a female
American teen, the working class and the culturally ignored yet manages to be
funny, heart warming and unapologetically to it’s protagonist all the same.
Greta Gerwig clearly used her life story as the inspiration for Lady Bird, and it shows for the better.
-
Maurice Jones
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