**** outta *****

4 outta 5

Lady Bird is a really funny and heartfelt coming of age comedy drama.  It doesn’t have a straight plot line because the only real plot is that the main character is going to graduate high school.  At most it’s a collection of random scenes set mostly in and around high school with some great, wry quips.  Writer/director Greta Gerwig’s movie is very truthful, emotionally low key yet resonant and with a fantastic lead performance and it only slightly falters when trying too hard to manipulate the audience’s emotions.  But overall it is so charmingly quirky that is totally okay. 

In 2002, Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan), real name Catherine but she gave herself the moniker Lady Bird, is in her senior year at a Catholic High School and yearns to escape to college on the East Coast.  Not supporting a move is her mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf), who believes it’ll be too expensive and angrily snarks that her daughter wouldn’t have the grades for it anyway.  While Lady Bird is dragging herself through her final year she hangs out with her best friend, romances a few boys, and can’t wait to get out of there but not before going through a few important milestones. 

Ronan is great as Lady Bird who may fall into the standard mold of being an extraordinary girl in an ordinary town but Ronan makes her lovable as there are a lot of big moments that doesn’t include bombastic acting but her subtle reactions.  She’s also hilarious as she has a one-liner ready for any situation.  Lady Bird herself may go through the standard high school movie coming of age checklist, first love, broken heart, first intimate experience, getting drunk, badgering with friends and family, but Ronan sells it. 

Lady Bird’s relationship with her mother is problematic which is odd because it’s a huge component of the flick.  Metcalf puts in an excellent performance of a character that is somewhat unevenly written as she goes from pleasant to hateful in a second.  That may be the point about the complicated relationship between daughters and mothers but Marion often crosses the line to downright nasty.  And stays there.   

Anyway, since the movie is called Lady Bird, and she’s the focal point of every single scene, automatically the audience’s sympathies lie with the title character.  So, by the end, the movie is trying to make the audience feel sorry for the mother but she’s been so incredibly mean to her daughter the mom being discarded feels like justified comeuppance.  She is such an hard person to like one wonders why Lady Bird even tries. The movie definitely portrays the mother as the antagonist so when Lady Bird comes to an emotional catharsis, she seems more like a victim of an abusive relationship than someone who has grown.  

The mother daughter relationship may be the emotional core but the movie is really more about random, vaguely connected funny or emotional vignettes. There are a couple of details the movie gets perfectly, like the montage of Lady Bird going through the drudgery of the final year and the robotic motions of her Catholic daily routine.    Very true to life is the kids couldn’t care less about class because the college applications have already been sent and, as Lady Bird correctly says, “I think we’re done with the learning portion of high school.” The opening scene involves Lady Bird and her mother wiping away tears while listening to an audiobook classic, suddenly degenerating into a bitter fight, and then Lady Bird ends the argument by throwing herself out of the car, which is stunning but funny because then it cuts to Lady Bird wearing a pink cast on her arm.  Even at barely 90 minutes, the movie has a wee bit too many endings, featuring a last minute run at the airport and, be it mainstream romantic comedy or indie darling Lady Bird, someone rushing to the airport to say something is getting cliché.  It’s almost was well worn as the Big Glowy CGI Thing in the climax of superhero movies. 

The movie is consistently, darkly funny in the caustic barbs and awkward quips Lady Bird throws out, like when she tries to flirt and ends up making a badly delivered joke about killing his family.  When Lady Bird loses her virginity there’s a cynically funny moment where she says she did it while being on top and “Who the %&*$ is on top their first time?”  Lady Bird is set in 2002 but there isn’t any reason since coming of age stories are timeless. The only millage the movie gets out of the year is musical selection, a few winking references to oncoming proliferation of cell phones, and the odd reference to 9/11 and Republicans. 

While Lady Bird may not be the most original movie ever made, a lot of its component pieces are cobbled together from coming of age films and mumblecore hang out dramedies, it is very engaging and entertaining.  Especially Ronan as Lady Bird who may be a bit of a brat who doesn’t know as much as she thinks she does but is still someone to care about.