Release Year: 2017
Director: Greta Gerwig
Runtime: 94 minutes
350 pages. That’s the alleged length of Greta Gerwig’s original script for Lady Bird. I will get to the importance of this fact after I first discuss what I liked most about this Sacramento-set coming-of-age dramedy, which at times feels like more than that, and sometimes feels like less.
The protagonist Christine, self-christened “Lady Bird,” is not an instantly likable one. The film’s opening scene gives the audience the good, bad, and ugly of her complex personality and the frankly unpleasant moods that come from it. She is in many ways a victim of her environment: not necessarily her physical one, but that of her psychology. She is a teenager in a school full of people nicer than her and nastier than her, she lives without a role model worth following by her standard, and she seems to be torn by dilemmas she can never understand, for they reside in the emotional realm.
Typical adolescence. . . and it works. Lady Bird stands out among its contemporary peers in that it tells a familiar Bildungsroman tale in a time period thoroughly neglected by most narratives: the early 2000s. The grit of growing up certainly does get through to the viewer thanks in large part to Saoirse Ronan’s excellent performance as the titular character: every little expression on her face or in her actions warrant some kind of response, be it contempt or sympathy. The most convincing teenager, however, was in the portrayal by Beanie Feldstein. Among some shaky performances, hers very much stood out in a way of which I was hoping to see more throughout the film.
Side note before I go into the negatives: I know nothing about Sacramento or any city like it, but in 94 minutes I felt like I’d lived there for a while. The cinematography’s meshing with the events of the story paid off beautifully in this regard, and I applaud the whole team for that.
As far as the other characters, all of them seemed to be written very well, adding to the astonishment that this is Gerwig’s solo debut in the writer/director’s position. Each peer from Lady Bird’s school did not feel like a flat, categorical result of a personality test, but they could each receive a distinct one, and in realistic ways. The acting that brought life to the characters was a bit of a blemish, however. Some perfectly fine pieces of dialogue came off awkwardly and purposelessly, and iffy lines were not always “pulled off” by the actors portraying them. Every line from Timothée Chalamet in particular was less believable than the last. What could have passed for honest or even satirical portrayals of teenagers instead at times felt like an ensemble of caricatures despite the good writing beneath them. The same suspension of belief (and I mean that) was not nearly as present in the adult characters, thankfully.
The real issue, or at least my real issue, with this movie is the pacing. Lady Bird clocks in at well under two hours after a significant journey alongside many, many characters. Lady Bird undergoes a grand arc, traditional in most coming-of-age stories, yet the movie objectively flies by. There are two core reasons I consider this aspect to be prominently problematic.
First, it leads to several other problems. The characters are realistic and well rounded for the most part, but not every action can be well justified in an hour-and-a-half movie. Lady Bird has a specific scene where she expresses sincere gratitude one second, level-headed authority the next, and finally an odd mix of determination and resentment, all in a succession that is not just illogical emotionally, it is illogical narratively. When the character’s actions seem unexplained or unjustified in how surprising they are, the audience gets this metaphysical “sense” that they’re watching a movie, instead of enjoying it or at least giving it time and thought. “Snaps” out of the narrative flow abound as characters jump to betrayal or turmoil in swift ways that, yes, had events leading up to them but fail in providing sensical trails of plot to and from them for the audience to care. It all moves too quickly for the story to truly flow. Growing up is a long process that feels like it takes even longer, and with all the realism elsewhere in the movie, this fact seems unfairly distorted.
My second grievance is rooted in the first as well as the fact I mentioned at the beginning of the review: the movie’s original script was 350 pages long. The situation is clearly not that Gerwig did not have any material with which to better allocate the movie’s focus, nor is it that she is not capable of telling a broader story. This is not necessarily a problem I have with the movie itself, and yet. . . it is, because it reveals so much of the potential I hoped to see. Those swift character arcs could have been fleshed out, those inexplicable motives could have been explained, those narrative turns that appear to be idle loose threads could have been woven delicately, and those contrivances could have received the necessary buildup that would have made them much more natural.
The journey that acts as the center of the movie, the maturity of Lady Bird, is indeed a fascinating enough one. Her story is quite absorbing most of the time, which is why I wanted to see more of it, and learn more about this more clearly significant life led by an obnoxiously understandable teen. The biggest genius of the movie is perhaps the fact that the audience has the opportunity to learn alongside Lady Bird. Even with the movie’s opening scene and its focus on her and her mother, all the other competitively distracting events of the movie vie for attention as well, much like real life. Without the blatant title Mothers and Daughters that the movie originally sported (I got this fact and the one regarding the 350-page script from IMDb Trivia), the audience gets to find the value of their relationship at the same time, though likely not at the same rate, as Lady Bird.
The movie obviously opts to bear the title of its protagonist instead. What will Christine make of this identity? Is Lady Bird a different person than Christine? Will she change that? Has she changed that? The movie brilliantly balances this sense of identity with many other discoveries that are made in the late teen years. Sometimes this is to a fault, as an exhausting plethora of social issues are all present and at times cramped in the originally focused plot, but who knows: maybe a longer runtime would have explained those seemingly loose ends. The ends that are not loose, however, surely do make for a bold, heartfelt, realistic movie that proves unlikable characters can still go on likable journeys.
AL Movie Index 