The French philosopher Simone Weil wrote often of attention as a kind of spiritual discipline. “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” she wrote in her notebooks, an idea she later would continue to develop, eventually concluding that attention “presupposes faith and love.”
In a Q&A following a festival screening of her masterful solo directorial debut Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig quoted Weil, and it’s clear from the film that this spirit of faith, love, generosity, and attention animates the whole endeavor. Lady Bird is a coming-of-age film starring the great Saoirse Ronan as Christine — or “Lady Bird,” as she’s re-christened herself — and it’s as funny, smart, and filled with yearning as its heroine. Lady Bird is an act of attention, and thus love, from Gerwig, not just toward her hometown of Sacramento but also toward girlhood, and toward the feeling of always being on the outside of wherever real life is happening.
The movie also confirms what movie lovers have long suspected: Gerwig is by far one of the most talented filmmakers working today, both onscreen and behind the camera, confident and winsome in a way nearly unparalleled by her contemporaries. Lady Bird is the rare movie that manages to be affectionate, entertaining, hilarious, witty, and confident; it’s one of the best films of 2017, and certainly my favorite.
Lady Bird chronicles one girl’s senior year of high school
Lady Bird opens with an epigraph, something Joan Didion told Michiko Kakutani in a 1979 New York Times profile: “Anybody who talks about California hedonism,” Didion said, leaning to look out an airplane window as they flew from Los Angeles to her hometown of Sacramento, “has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.”
Didion and Gerwig are both from Sacramento, and so is Lady Bird — the name, she says, is her given name, because “it’s given to me, by me.” She starts her senior year at a Catholic girls’ high school in 2002, with pink-dyed hair, a deep love for Dave Matthews Band’s song “Crash Into Me,” and dreams of getting out of Sacramento to go to college in New York City. On her bedroom wall, she’s scrawled a line from Anna Karenina — “Boredom: The Desire for Desires.” She wants, more than anything, to lead a life that’s the opposite of Sacramento. She wants to be extraordinary.
Lady Bird lives on what she jokingly calls “the wrong side of the tracks,” along with her father Larry (Tracy Letts), her mother Marion (an extraordinary Laurie Metcalf), and her brother Miguel (Jordan Rodrigues) and his girlfriend Shelly (Marielle Scott). They’re all crammed into a neat but small house; her parents had hoped they’d be able to upgrade long ago, but tight finances kept getting in the way.
Lady Bird bickers with Marion, whose fears about finances and her daughter’s future often tilt her into passive aggression, and who’s insistent that a California college is the best option. Lady Bird’s escape from home is at school, where she hangs out with her best friend Julie (the absolutely fantastic Beanie Feldstein) and joins the drama club in an attempt to pad out her college applications.
Drama is conducted jointly with the nearby Catholic boys’ school and led by Father Leviatch (Stephen Henderson). During rehearsals for the fall musical production of Merrily We Roll Along, Lady Bird develops a crush on Danny (Lucas Hedges), the sweet redheaded boy from a big Irish Catholic family who becomes her first real love, though she can’t help eyeing too-cool-for-school Kyle (Timothée Chalamet) at a party too.
The film’s arc is deceptively simple, following Lady Bird through her senior year (which is helped along by some excellent editing and a joyful, buoyant score from Jon Brion). She struggles with math and kisses Danny and fights with Marion. She loses her virginity. She and Julie lie on the floor at school and giggle about sex and eat unconsecrated communion wafers. They go to mass and celebrate holidays. They dream about the future.
Lady Bird harbors remarkably deep ideas beneath its surface
But there’s a remarkable amount of depth beneath this apparently conventional arc. In Lady Bird, Gerwig has taken the familiar teenage girl coming-of-age plot and turned it into something rather extraordinary and carefully observed, the kind of movie that actually reveals layers on repeated viewing.
Inside Lady Bird are meditations on parenting, on struggling with money, and on the ways the future is never quite what we wanted it to be. But its strongest and subtlest theme is that closely attending to the world around us, and to the people around us, is a kind of grace that makes space for us to love.
The film is mostly told from Lady Bird’s perspective, and like most high school seniors, her attention is all focused on herself and her own troubles. But through the year, a series of small conversations, captured in vignettes and glimpses, punctures her self-involvement. Everything that happens — heartbreak, embarrassment, disappointment, elation — all of it is evidence that other people struggle too, whether it’s Julie’s sadness at being left out of Lady Bird’s expanding social circle, or Lady Bird’s father’s growing realization that his best efforts to bolster his career are never going to be good enough.
The biggest troubles in Lady Bird’s world are in her family; they’re struggling with finances in a way that a teenager usually can’t fully comprehend, and when Larry loses his job it ratchets up Marion’s anxieties too. Lady Bird’s yearning to leave Sacramento hurts her mother; her shame about her family’s humble house — especially compared to those of some of the affluent kids at school — hurts her father.
The movie’s central pairing is Lady Bird and Marion, in a mother-daughter relationship that’s drawn with rare sensitivity. Marion’s awareness of her family’s money struggles spills over into almost every conversation with her daughter. She refers to Lady Bird’s “wealthy friends” with a kind of bitterness that paves over insecurity, and she’s clearly terrified that Lady Bird will look down on her parents. But Lady Bird doesn’t care all that much about the money beyond how it affects her college plans; she’s worried that her mom simply doesn’t like her very much.
The two of them are in deep need of actually seeing each other, instead of peering through glasses they’ve tinted themselves over 18 years of living in the same house. Lady Bird’s arc moves toward this point — helped along by the inevitable changes that come with high school graduation and the start of college — and when the realization finally hits mother and daughter that they truly love each other, it’s a rare and grace-filled moment to see in a teen-focused comedy.
Lady Bird is beautifully realized and filled with wisdom
To get all this depth into a film is hard enough; to get it into such a purely enjoyable movie is a small miracle, especially one that’s so loaded with delights. Lady Bird gets a lot about being a teenager right, but it’s especially good on being a teenager during the 2002-’03 school year, right down to the fashions (Lady Bird’s wealthier friends wear the ubiquitous Abercrombie rugby shirts, while Lady Bird’s clothing clearly comes from a thrift store and is a season or two off) and the music — contemporary songs like Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” butt up against the sort of mid-’90s tracks that teenagers of the era grew up listening to, hits by Dave Matthews Band, Alanis Morissette, and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony.
Lady Bird is about a year younger than Gerwig (and me, incidentally), and though Gerwig’s insisted in interviews that the film isn’t a roman à clef, she renders Lady Bird’s senior year — and the texture of the city where she lives — with such loving detail that it’s obvious how much of it is rooted in a shared reality with her character. Much of that love is directed at the Catholic girls’ school that Lady Bird attends (Gerwig attended one as well), and in particular, headmistress Sister Sarah Joan (Lois Smith), who is a voice of wisdom (and good humor) for the otherwise religiously uninterested Lady Bird.
But the movie sustains a kind of grace and faith, with the school year’s rhythms fitting into the religious holidays that can’t help but seep into Lady Bird’s bones. And it’s Sister Sarah Joan, ultimately, who opens Lady Bird’s eyes to her real feelings about Sacramento. After reading her college entrance essay, she remarks that Lady Bird clearly loves the city. “You write about Sacramento so affectionately, and with such care,” she tells her. When Lady Bird replies that she just pays attention, Sister Sarah Joan says, “Don’t you think they are the same thing? Love and attention?”
Lady Bird seems only half-convinced, but by the end of the movie it’s clear that the lesson has sunk in. She has, by fits and starts, started to really look at the people around her, and thereby to grow into who she is becoming. Growing up means learning to love the world for what it is — and in making Lady Bird, Gerwig has done the same. Simone Weil would be proud.
Lady Bird opens in limited theaters on November 3 and will roll out in the weeks following.