acid reflects

As I watched this, I saw my mom and my sister on the screen. Actually, no. I told my seatmate that the McPhersons are more emotionally articulate than my family. Such is life.

Lady Bird
Written and Directed by Greta Gerwig

I’m not familiar with what Sacramento is particularly famous for, and maybe that’s just part of (or contributed to) the reason why Lady Bird AKA Christine (Saoirse Ronan) is bored to death of her lifeless high school teen life there.

Lady Bird is about to finish high school and wants to venture out into the creative world, like New York, but she’s neither talented (as her very eager high school musical audition yielded a chorus line spot,) smart (she wants to be in a math club, contrary to her adviser’s opinion,) rich (her father Larry (Tracy Letts) just lost his job) nor supported (in particular by her passive-agressive mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf.)

For much of the film, Lady Bird struggles to just be a normal high school teenager who isn’t really popular, flunks at math and has a likewise unpopular best friend, but dreams of doing something right for herself one day after high school. She does get a boyfriend in the story but that also doesn’t play out well. The crux of the movie Lady Bird is the very awkward, often stormy exchange between mother and daughter that is either deadpan hilarious or bitingly savage.

One can almost say that that is the DNA of the dialogue in the film – how every character says one thing when it shows that they would want to mean another. On the surface, both Lady Bird and Marion have tones of defeat (“What if this is the best it can be?”) – but in demonstration show that they struggle to win each day.

This is not a particularly visual film in the sense that it’s not visually stylized nor lensed with a certain lighting – I’m trying not to say it’s not cinematic, although it is – it’s strength is its larger-than-life characters who complete the film in each frame. It’s quirky, but never absurd nor nonsensical.

Ronan is tone-perfect as a teen struggling to find a purpose as her adulthood nears, while Metcalf should’ve received the Oscar for Support as a mother who can’t say what she truly means. Odds and ends, the rest of the cast are memorable too, including Lady Bird’s best friend Julie (Beanie Feldstein,) her boyfriend/ex Lucas (Danny O’Neil,) her adoptive brother Miguel (Jordan Rodrigues) and his girlfriend Shelly (Marielle Scott), and the douche musician Kyle (Timotheé Chalamet.) Lady Bird is easily my other favorite Ensemble of the Year, after Three Billboards.

#LadyBird is funny, tumultuous and heartwrenching – fantastically written into one glorious piece.

Depending on which side of the tracks you were on passing through youth, it can make you long for friends gone quickly by, or, it can wring you for all the words unspoken in your family. I straddled on both.

(Photos courtesy of United International Pictures)