lady bird (w&d greta gerwig)

I realise I’m not the captive audience for Gerwig’s coming of age story, nevertheless I can’t quite get around the feeling that it’s an inordinately twee, safe piece of filmmaking. Rohmer seems to be cropping up a lot this week, and there are indeed strong links between Lady Bird and Call Me by My Name, both featuring somewhat bland but supposedly likeable protoganists going about the business of growing up, losing their virginity, etc. But again, if the reference to Rohmer is permitted, there’s not a great deal of angst (which I confess was one of the predominant emotions of my late adolescence so I might have a skewed perspective), or self-doubt. Soarise Ronan’s Lady Bird is a brittley self-confident character, who fends off the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without ever looking like she’s in any danger of being derailed by them. Maybe it’s unfair to compare an account of a Sacramento childhood to a post-war European one, but even Sofia Coppola’s films have considerably more edge than Lady Bird. Again, I recognise that I might be perceived as being curmudgeonly in my response. This is just a crowd-pleaser, you might say. The fact that the heroine’s home on the “wrong side of the tracks” looks like one 90% of the world’s population might sacrifice a family member to obtain, despite having only one bathroom (how did they survive?!), despite the fact that a series of young male leads seem more than happy to throw themselves at Lady Bird’s feet, this isn’t supposed to be taken all that seriously. Only, taken seriously it has been, with the film lauded and the director garlanded. Sure, it’s not a bad film, slightly less engaging than Submarine, for example, but the heavyweight response to this lightweight fare says a lot about the weird cul-de-sac that Anglo-Saxon cinematic culture has managed to find itself driving down. 

(nb - I was far more interested in discovering Ladybird’s brother Miguel’s story, but this ended up feeling like a narrative footnote more than anything else, designed to lend colour rather than depth. How come she has a (presumably adopted) Latino brother? What does this say about her family and values in modern day USA? Or was it just thrown in as a bone to keep the liberal demographic happy? Am quite surprised not to have come across even the slightest commentary regarding the convenient existence of the marginalised Miguel in any of the reviews.)