Review By Debadrita Dey
From what I can recount, I’ve watched Lady Bird at least a million times now. It is my go-to comfort film. To be a little bit more precise I would say that Lady Bird is all about the little moments that we tend to turn a blind eye to while hustling with life and existence. The idea of making and breaking friendships, a first love gone wrong, a kind of not negotiable relationship with mothers, it’s all about the little things that we have all gone through while growing up but somehow those moments have lost their significance since we have not been in touch with those emotions for so long. They just get lost somewhere in the unknown and often on a cold winter night while you are tucked up in your bed and all your mind does is take you back to a certain summer that you promised yourself to remember throughout your entire life, gets a little blurry and you never question yourself how the memories get all worn out and dusted because frankly enough, you don’t have enough time to do so.
To be a teenager can be one hell of a job at times, you have to learn to deal with your emotions and learn to place them carefully in the exact place where they deserve to be in, set boundaries but at times being overtaken by this very strong urge to cross them. It’s a handful of emotions taking over you, overwhelming you and even before you realize it, you find yourself being busy enough in ransacking your brain about something else that just seems to be more important.
Lady Bird is the evening that falls after a bright sunset or perhaps a mesmerizing twilight that you refused to take your eyes off from. It takes your breath at the very first scene and then you find yourself immersed in the story and momentarily catching a glimpse of yourself here and there throughout the film. Lady Bird is you but at the same time she is not you. This is the beauty of the character who at times run parallel to your emotions and then suddenly intertwines with yours leaving you wondering whether you see a reflection of yourself or someone else.
Born on the “wrong side of tracks” in Sacramento, Christine is like any other middle class family’s rebel daughter who duly believes that she can make it through the world all by herself, after all, freedom and naivety only takes you so far. The film carefully articulates the life of teenager to whom the world is anything but a roller-coaster and to whom restrictions are no more than roadblocks. It is your everyday life around the house and your home-town going about with a life that would otherwise appear mundane because clearly none of us would sit through everyday little details. What can possibly go wrong as teenager? Everything and nothing at the same time. Lady Bird is a feelgood film with carefully dealt emotions, capturing the essence of first holding on and letting go, of friendships being tested through the ravages of time, of love being a second hand embarrassment and at times chances that seem rather vague, breaking rules a lot of them, being on an emotional war with parents and a strong desire of flying away from home and being independent.
I won’t say too much about the film because once gripped by my passion I might as well end up blurting out the whole plot of it. Rather, I might as well take a seat back and let you feel it with your whole heart, return back to your late teen years and feel the hormones warming up once again.
The most beautiful thing about the film is how Greta Gerwig managed to control and weigh on each and every emotion carefully. That being said, of course certain emotions overpowered one another but somehow the characters demand you to feel what they go through. Moreover, it’s not a cliched memory finding it’s way back to reality rather a nod to the memories of girlhood and growing up. The moments, so intricately and finely captured bring a homely feeling. It is your story but at the same time looked carefully enough, you might as well end up asking yourself by the time the film ends and the end credits roll out, or maybe it isn’t?
Rating: 5/5
• A year in the life of a young woman living in northern California who believes she’s bigger than the town she’s from.
• Written/Directed by: Greta Gerwig (Frances Ha, Mistress America).
• Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf.
Orange County meets Garden State, without the pizazz.
Based loosely on Gerwig’s own life and where she’s from. Lady Bird was an honest and truthfully told coming of age story, that I’m sure will ring like a cult anthem to many a millennial. It was relatable and real and never the less, boring. Like taking a trip through a high schoolers diary: It was fun and intriguing at first, but after 100 pages it started to feel more like being stuck on a long bus ride in which you asked the wrong person ‘how’s it going?’
coming in, I assumed that if I didn’t care for this movie, it would surely be because it just wasn’t ‘for’ me. That it would be a good film but I wouldn’t be able to understand or connect. As it turns out, the problem for me was quite the opposite. This film does a fantastic job of capturing characters at a certain time in their lives – as a child, parent, sibling, and young adult – that we’ve all gone through. But, maybe that’s just not enough anymore?
The problem with the modern day coming of age tale is, we’re a generation who records and captions every emotion, micro-milestone, and urge in real time. The world is a battlefield, and we’re all armed to the teeth with unlimited automatic time capsules. And because of that, every day when you log onto your social media and scroll past the latest TimeHop, it feels like you’re ingesting real, relatable coming of age stories by the handful. Watching a film all about the petty little struggles we all face used to feel like a validation. Unfortunately, that ‘WHAT?! ME TOO!’ feeling I used to get from them has been replaced with a dismal ‘…yeah, we know.’ There’s nothing left unexplored about the purely relatable anymore, not on its own.
The acting was marvelous (We’re probably looking at a string of Oscar nominations here) and first time solo director Greta Gerwig was about as comfy in her chair as Captain James T. Kirk was in his. If this movie came out a decade ago, or attached itself to a more objective plot, this would have been a way different review.
As it stands, this movie may have captured some raw truth, but it failed to capture my attention.
PRESCRIPTION:
For a better coming of age movie: Watch boyhood (which could have just as easily been called sisterhood or motherhood or fatherhood)
For female driven movies I enjoyed more, tackling these themes and subjects: Pieces of April or Ghost World.
Rating: 3/5
This is the worst movie I’ve seen in a long time. I know this will cost me real grief but I’m not a Hollywood pseudointellectual who voted for an award for this movie. I found it to be very boring and very depressing I didn’t see any plotline. I know The Hollywood line is that this was a great movie. I left a movie about halfway through I was so bored to death. But then again I’m a deplorable. When I go to see a movie I want to be entertained not bored and depressed. I would recommend That anybody who suffers from depression not see this movie because I want to commit suicide halfway through. So if you want to take my advice don’t waste your time or money going to see this movie.
Rating: 1/5