Ah! You see this, Zack Snyder/Warner Bros.? This is how you do an intimate film! Lady Bird is amazing. Writer/director Greta Gerwig makes her (solo) directorial debut here with Lady Bird, a film loosely based on her own experiences growing up. It is a simple, yet wonderful premise: a young woman trying to make it through her senior year in northern California. That’s it!
At the centerpiece of this film is the relationship between Lady Bird and her mother. Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson is played brilliantly by the great Saoirse Ronan (in the best performance of the year I’ve seen so far), and her mom is played by Laurie Metcalf. Their chemistry and their dynamic is spectacular. One minute they’re best friends, the next they’re yelling at each other at full volume in a public place, and the next they’re best friends again. That feeling of spontaneity makes these performances amazing, and they are captured brilliantly by Gerwig.
Ronan’s grounded and subdued performance is as good as her role in Brooklyn. Here, Ronan is a gritty, down-to-earth and slightly nerdy high school senior who insists on being called Lady Bird. She and Metcalf carry this film. Outside of these two, there’s a strong supporting cast as well, with father figure Tracy Letts and love interests Lucas Hedges and Timothee Chalamet leading the way. I only wish that Gerwig herself made a cameo at some point, since this film is based around her own personal experiences.
The biggest things Lady Bird hits out of the park to create intimacy are the production design and cinematography. So many of the scenes in this film take place in small and quiet locations—a thrift store, a car, a kitchen. And when they happen, they’re shot so much better than Justice League could even dream of! If you’re trying to have an intimate moment, close-ups are the key. This film allows the actors playing these characters to show their emotions so well because, you know, we are looking at the actors and there’s nothing else on screen besides them to distract us. Justice League director Zack Snyder just can’t help himself. Whenever there’s an attempt at an intimate moment in that film, they are always filmed with these grand wide shots with a bunch of excess crap in the frame. About the most “action-packed” shots we have in Lady Bird are of simple things, like the countryside in the background (because the car our characters are in is moving) or having the characters looking at various pieces of clothing while they bicker. And it’s quiet! This film, when it’s trying to convey emotions, understands the power of silence, no unnecessary “white noise” score underneath. When someone does something particularly heinous, we’re given a moment of complete silence to let it sink in.
Lady Bird is also funny. Like, I was laughing hysterically more times than I could count. I mean, the film opens with Lady Bird jumping out of a moving car in the middle of her mother yelling at her. Then she wears a cast for half the movie because of it. About the only issue I had with this film was its short run time; there were some deep and interesting themes that were hastily investigated in Lady Bird, particularly with one of the love interests. Something major is brought up with a love interest, but it is then quickly dropped because there’s only so much you can do in 94 minutes. But that’s about the only misstep in this film. It is amazing, and well worth a watch.
