Lady Bird

Lady Bird – A Love Letter to our Origins and our Destinations

 What are our origins? Our mother, our family, our hometown. What are our destinations? The Future, the Unknown. This is what Lady Bird is about. Greta Gerwig guides us through these issues through nostalgic eyes of the life of a 17 years old girl in her senior year of high school as she is faced with heartbreak, anger, depression, rebellious feelings against her origins and longing to grow up and move on to the unknown future.

 This is my first film analysis and I decided to make it about Lady Bird, not only because it’s such a well-made and interesting movie, but also because I read an article from The Guardian titled “The male glance: how we fail to take women’s stories seriously” by Lili Loofborrow. This article is about how we tend to disregard female-centred stories as less artistic and complex than male-centred ones. That is precisely what I want to do in this analysis. I want to analyze the great complexity in themes present in this film and show that it isn’t just a run-of-the-mill coming-of-age flick and show the complexities that female-centred stories can have.

 The story of this film is told through the eyes of a 17 years old girl in her senior year of high school, played by the outstanding Saoirse Ronan. This girl through whose eyes we see a familiar unfamiliar world – almost like a memory from a past life, long forgotten – is called Lady Bird, or rather, calls herself Lady Bird, a name given to her by her. Just with this act of changing her name (or wanting to), we can see the rebellious attitude of the character. We can see the desire to completely break away from what was established to her (or what was given to her) and completely erase the connection to her origins – and what is the thing that is most immediately and most forcibly established to us if not our name? Just for the record, the name given to her by her parents is Christine.

 This rebellious character is very relatable since we all experience in some way rebellious feelings during our teenagehood. In a way, Lady Bird embodies the rebellious teen in all of us.

 But her rebellion doesn’t end in just her name. She is the definition of an anti-establishment rebel. She paints her hair pink, changing what was given to her by genetics. And she dreams about going to the East Coast, “where culture is” and “where writers live in the woods”.

 However, when the movie begins, we don’t immediately see this rebellion. We see her with her mom (played by the amazing Laurie Metcalf). They seem very connected and loving. The first thing we see is Lady Bird and her mom sleeping together, in the same bed, facing each other. There is no apparent discordance between the two women. They wake up. Lady Bird is looking at a mirror. She asks her mother if she looks like someone from Sacramento, her hometown. In this question, we can see a desire in Lady Bird to not be related to where she came from, a desire to be reborn as someone that isn’t her. Then we see them together in the car. They’re listening to an audiobook of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. They’re crying and bonding over a particularly emotional moment. They seem like they have a very strong relationship. Then the audiobook ends, and they start talking. Slowly, the conflict starts to emerge. They start to argue about the colleges Lady Bird wants to go. She wants to go to the East Coast. In that argument, we understand that the family has economic problems and that those colleges would be too expensive for them. It all climaxes in the first, and perhaps the most memorable, act of rebellion from Lady Bird – she throws herself out of the car.

 This could mislead to the idea that Lady Bird hates her mother, when that isn’t actually true. Teenage rebellion is not hate - it’s rather the opposite. Throughout the film, Lady Bird changes her opinion about her mother. Sometimes she says that her mother loves her very much, other times she says that her mother hates her. Teenage rebellion is the consequence of a confusion about oneself and others and a desire to change things both in the world and in oneself. The character of Lady Bird has these things present on her. She’s confused about what she wants and about what she thinks, about which people to hang out with and what to think about her mother. She also has a revolutionary spirit that wants to change the world, while at the same time she wants to change herself – her name, her hair, her origins. Because of this desire of change, she tries to distance herself from her mother but, because of her confusion, she, at the same time, deeply cares for her and doesn’t want to hurt her. And that is one of the most important messages that Greta Gerwig communicates with us – the importance of our connection to our mother because she is our anchor in this world.

 However, this rebellion is not just present in her relationship with her mother. It’s also present in her relationship with her hometown, Sacramento - a character of its own. She hates it. She says that it’s boring. It’s “the mid-west of California”, as she says. She wants to go to New York, to get out to where there are exciting cultural events happening. But is this true? The way that Greta Gerwig films her hometown (Gerwig is also from Sacramento) creates this feeling of nostalgia for it, even if you have never been there – as I haven’t. You’ll want to go “back” there. It’s filmed so lovingly that it shows that Lady Bird, deep down, loves Sacramento. This is also observed in an essay that she writes about Sacramento that makes Sister Joan, her English teacher (played by Lois Smith) comment that she has a deep love for Sacramento.

 There is another very particular aspect of this movie that makes it so interesting. There is a feeling of discontinuity and flowing at the same time. What do I mean by this? You watch moments that may be separated by just a few seconds or whole weeks, but they are all connected, and they flow together like a river – time is a river. It’s as if you are watching separate loose moments of the life of someone and you watch all these experiences that make the characters grow and come of age. From friendships and rebellion to the first love and the exploration of one’s sexuality. This is probably the most brilliant aspect of Greta Gerwig’s direction. The way that she connects these moments seamlessly so perfectly, making the movie so much more original, unique and relatable.

 Another refreshing aspect of the film is that the story is about a girl. Period. There isn’t any boy that comes along and saves her, and they end up together forever. There are boys and she has two romantic relationships, but they aren’t the central point of the plot – and they don’t save her, she saves herself. They are very important to her, though. They teach very important lessons to Lady Bird about love and sex. The relationships Lady Bird has with these boys – Danny, played by Lucas Hedges, and Kyle, played by Timothée Chalamet – are ways that every one of us must grow up as human beings. And that is a very crucial aspect of this movie. It’s that every character has something to teach to Lady Bird (and us). And the character that probably gives the most important lesson to Lady Bird is Julie, her best friend – played by Beanie Feldstein. They may have some quarrels – and there is a whole section of the film where Lady Bird abandons Julie – but, in the end, they end up back together, and maybe stronger than ever. True friends will always be there and will always stick together – and that is one of the most central messages of the film.

 I’ve talked about the theme of origins in Lady Bird, but what about the destinations? The movie ends with that subject. It ends unexpectedly. It might even give an idea that it’s too short. But that’s the point. Teenage years are fleeting and short and at the same time very rich with events and happenings and complexities. The movie portrays this perfectly. It’s a relatively short film (only an hour and a half long) yet it’s very rich with content and thought-provoking moments. But, what does this have to do with destinations? The movie ends on this note. Lady Bird goes to college. But when she gets there she understands her love for her origins – her parents and her hometown. She accepts herself better away from home, in an alien place. She finds out that it’s when we don’t have those things we were so used to that we miss them and are able to love them. It’s in a very deeply emotional moment that Lady Bird – and we -  understand the big message of the movie. She realizes all the things she has done to her mother and she realizes the love she has for Sacramento. She accepts her real name, Christine, accepting her origins. The name of “Lady Bird”, her hair color, her actions - they were nothing more than a performance – like the ones she gives on the stage. It’s a way to protect herself from the pain of growing up. She has a final act of self-destruction – alcohol poisoning – before she comes to terms with accepting her own identity. And then, after coming to terms with this, she – like all of us – must move on and face the big unknown future. Face college and adult life. Grow up. Take a deep breath and take a step forward. And that’s where the movie ends. The deep breath. Cut to black.

That’s why this movie is a love letter to our origins and our destinations. It makes us value our mother – you’ll want to call her and hug her after watching it – and makes us value what has been given to us. It also inspires us to face our destiny and make the best out of it. We just have to take that deep breath and go.