My friend Suzanne's choice of Lady Bird for this year's Christmas movie date turned out to be perfect for us. For her, writer-director Greta Gerwig dissects the special relationship between mother and daughter, in dialogue always teetering between hilarious and harrowing. For me, there's the intersection of the movie with two of my lifelong interests, Church and Stephen Sondheim's Broadway musicals. The director discussed all three threads of the movie in an interview with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air in November.
Like any Sondheim musical, the opening scene sets up motifs and patterns for the whole movie:
High school senior Christine (Saoirse Ronan) and her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf) are sharing a moment in a road trip, crying at the end of a book on tape. In mere seconds, silence erupts into conflict over Christine's desire to go to college as far as possible from their home town Sacramento, over her dim prospects of getting into any college anywhere when she "can't even pass her driving test," and over the girl's new name. Christine speaks a line that Gerwig conceived before she even knew what the rest of the movie would be about: "Why don't you call me 'Lady Bird?' You promised that you would." The girl throws open the door and escapes the moving car.
The rest of the movie unpacks that scene. "Lady Bird" tries to escape through relationships with a sunny drama geek named Danny (Lucas Hedges), a darkly pretentious loner named Kyle (Timothee Chalomet), and a popular rich girl Jenna (Odeya Rush), sacrificing her friendship with Julie (Beanie Feldstein). She enlists help of her gentle father (Tracy Letts) to get a scholarship to an eastern school. She cheats to boost her academic average. When the girl finally asserts her real self, she gets out of another car -- while the pop song "Crash" plays on the radio.
At every turn, the daughter bumps up against her mom's money worries and disappointed expectations. "I want you to be the very best version of yourself that you can be," the mother tells her daughter, who retorts, "But what if this is the best version?" The mother has no answer. Gerwig told Terry Gross that this is the kind of moment she loves, when language fails to express what characters are feeling. Gerwig says that the mother is afraid for her daughter. We can see her point, and her daughter's, too; "neither one is the villain," Gerwig says.
While I appreciated all that, I was thrilled that the relationship with Danny develops in the context of rehearsals for Merrily We Roll Along. Gerwig tells Terry Gross that she chose that show for its resonance with her characters, mother and daughter. "The show has a central ache -- about how where you end up and how where you're from are so connected and so different." An article in Spin online dwells on this point, how both Christine's parents are dealing with the disappointments in their own lives. "In the end, Gerwig juxtaposes images of both women driving through Sacramento, making their lives feel, for a moment, like different stages in the same story." (Winston Cook-Wilson in Spin.com). (About the musical and its themes, see my blogpost.)
I was also delighted that the biggest breakthroughs in the movie come through interaction with the Church. Christine attends a Catholic high school, so there's the expected snickering at the girls' uniform code, the nun who swoons over a paragraph of romance in Kierkegaard, and the chaperone's requiring "six inches for the Holy Spirit" between dancing couples. But the passage of time is marked by communion and the reminder of Ash Wednesday, "You are dust and to dust you shall return."
An elderly nun (Lois Smith) gives "Lady Bird" wise advice with a mischievous twist, pointing her in a new direction each time. Considering the girl's college application essay, the nun observes that the girl's vivid description of Sacramento bespeaks deep love for her home, but Christine vehemently denies that, saying she was just paying close attention to detail. The nun counters, "Love and paying attention: Aren't they the same thing?" The question begins Christine's re-examination of all her beliefs and relationships. At a low point, Christine stumbles into a church and stands in luminous sunlight, dumbfounded by the beauty of the choir's song.
Gerwig is no Catholic, she told Terry Gross, but she found the nuns and priests in her own Catholic school days to be "interesting," the stories and liturgy "enriching," and singing in the choir a joy. Her understanding of the saints is important to the whole movie. Their stories frequently are those of arrogant, difficult teenagers whose ambitions "can be translated to something holy." Ignatius, for example, turned his childish desire to be "the best" saint into a spiritual practice that works. Gerwig named the girl "Christine" partly in homage to her own mother Christine, but also because it's the feminine form of "Christ."
The chosen name "Lady Bird" suggests both Christine's arty pretentions and flying away; but the portrait of Christine in the film's poster, posed to suggest a stained-glass icon, with crucifix in the background, is reminiscent of portraits of "Our Lady" Mary. A detail in the back view of the poster (see photo, below) uses the "bird" to suggest that it's another Christian symbol, for something we see moving through all the ups and downs of Christine's story, the Spirit.
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