Again it’s Oscar season and I thought it would be cool to catch some of the nominees and winners in an actual cinema. Unfortunately session timings for The Shape of Water didn’t work for us so I picked this instead, a film that received a number of nominations but failed to actually win anything. It helps that we’ve already seen Saoirse Ronan in a number of roles and it’s the first feature film directed by  Greta Gerwig, an actress who both my wife and myself liked in a couple of films.

Christine McPherson is a teenager who is unhappy with growing up in Sacramento, castigating it as a wasteland without culture. She also yearns to have more than what her financially insecure family can provide, frequently coming into conflict with her mother who believes that she should be more grateful for what she already has. She insists that everyone call her Lady Bird, her chosen name for herself. She mocks her adopted elder brother and his girlfriend who lives with them. Together with her best friend Julie, she enrolls in the school’s theatre program where she gets to know a boy, Danny, who becomes her boyfriend. As Danny’s family is well-off, this fuels her dreams to marrying and moving into a big house. But then she discovers that Danny is gay and after breaking off to him gets close to another boy who is part of the school’s popular and cool but rebellious crowd. Meanwhile she secretly gets her father to help her apply for financial aid to study on the east coast, despite knowing that this would make her mother angry.

This is a meandering, coming-of-age story with no real central plot. It also bears some superficial similarities with The Edge of Seventeen, another film which I quite liked. Lady Bird however is the more nuanced and I would say richer film. I like that while Christine behaves badly in many ways and inconsiderate in how she treats her family members, the film itself never says that she is wrong for wanting more out of life or for having higher aspirations. I also like how she is an interesting, sympathetic character with plenty of character flaws and for the most part the film manages to avoid having a single magical moment of her turning her whole life around. Instead what happens is that we watch grow up as an organic process over the course of the film. For example, I like to think that one reason she grew out of the pretentiousness of having everyone call her Lady Bird is the realization of how much of poseur it makes her look like after having known Kyle and his friends.

Unfortunately the film still resorts to the old, familiar tropes at times, with how Christine’s best friend is an overweight girl being the prime example. The airport leave-taking scene is overly familiar though I suppose it is used so often because it is a recurring one for any young adult leaving home for the first. On balance, I’d still rate this highly and it feels rich enough to me that I thought that it must have been based on a book. Instead it seems to have been based on Gerwig’s own memories of growing up in Sacramento. It’s a great example of how an ordinary girl’s life without any extraordinary events or twists can made into a solid film.