What’s so Great About Lady Bird | Video Essay

Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird has been attracting all kinds of praise and accolades. What’s all the hype about? What’s so great about it?

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Transcript provided by Youtube:

00:05
Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut, Lady Bird, has been attracting
00:09
all kinds of praise, accolades and hype.
00:12
At one point on Rotten Tomatoes, it broke Toy Story 2’s record
00:16
for the most “fresh” reviews ever.
00:18
It had one of the best indie box office openings of the year and took home top Golden Globes.
00:23
A.O. Scott of The New York Times called the film “perfect.”
00:27
So what is all the hype about?
00:29
What’s so great about Lady Bird?
00:32
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00:54
Now back to Lady Bird.
00:56
First a quick look at the story.
00:58
Fiercely independent teen Christine McPherson has christened herself “Lady Bird.”
01:03
“That’s your given name?”
01:04
“Yeah.”
01:05
“Why is it in quotes?”
01:06
“I gave it to myself.
01:07
It’s given to me, by me.”
01:09
She itches to escape Sacramento and her all-girls Catholic school
01:12
for a place where she can be more herself.
01:14
“I want to go where culture is, like New York.”
01:16
“How in the world did I raise such a snob?”
01:17
“Or at least Connecticut, or New Hampshire, where writers live in the woods.”
01:21
“You couldn’t get into those schools anyway.”
01:22
We watch her battle with her mother, test out different friends and boyfriends,
01:26
go to prom and try to figure out who she is.
01:29
“One pack of Camel Lights.
01:30
A scratcher.
01:31
And a Playgirl.”
01:32
“ID?”
01:33
“It’s my birthday today.”
01:34
One of the most powerful things about this film is its thesis —
01:40
that love is really attention.
01:42
When reading Lady Bird’s college essay, the principal of her school compliments
01:46
how clearly Lady Bird’s love for Sacramento comes through in her attention to detail.
01:51
She only realizes how much she does love her hometown after she leaves.
01:56
Everything else we see in this story is also informed by
01:58
this poignant observation that love is a form of attention,
02:02
which isn’t always easy or pleasant.
02:04
Lady Bird’s mother Marion pays nonstop attention to her,
02:08
and it can feel overbearing, judgmental, or burdensome —
02:11
but it is how she loves her daughter.
02:13
When Lady Bird ditches her best friend Julie for a rich, popular girl
02:16
who can help her get close to a new crush,
02:19
the betrayal is again about attention.
02:21
If we take our attention away from someone, we are essentially taking our love away.
02:26
So more than anything — in both its form and its content, its style and its story —
02:30
Lady Bird’s message is to value what surrounds you, to truly sweat the details of your life.
02:38
The film itself is the result of great attention paid by its writer-director, Gerwig.
02:44
It’s a period piece of sorts — the “period” being the not-so-distant year of 2002.
02:50
To capture this sense of recent cultural history, Gerwig and her DP Sam Levy
02:54
aimed to give the film the visual quality of a memory.
02:57
It was shot on digital, but they worked to emulate the look of Xerox copies
03:01
and early 2000s yearbook photos —
03:04
images not overtly nostalgic, but that feel at a remove.
03:08
Inspired by Sacramento’s rivers, they incorporated blues into the color palette,
03:12
and the blues are paired with pastels to recall paintings of everyday objects
03:16
by Northern California’s Wayne Thiebaud.
03:18
And then there are the “period” details in the costumes and soundtrack
03:22
to remind viewers of the early 2000s at every turn —
03:25
from the secondhand Doc Marten Mary Janes and puka shell necklaces,
03:29
to key events in the Iraq war playing out on the TV,
03:32
to Lady Bird’s defiant admission that she does really like
03:36
Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash Into Me,”
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no matter how uncool the song may have been.
03:43
“Crash…into me.”
03:49
Lady Bird is a classic coming-of-age tale, capturing the universality of the teen experience
03:54
and its sometimes comedic obstacles.
03:56
“I just wanted it to be special.”
03:58
“Why?
03:59
You’re going to have so much un-special sex in your life.”
04:04
“[Screams]”
04:05
Think Stand by Me, Dazed and Confused, Mean Girls, Superbad or Moonlight.
04:10
Yet Lady Bird avoids clichés in a well-trodden territory
04:13
by giving us really specific characters and moments,
04:16
like the football coach trying to direct the school play.
04:19
And it finds its originality by changing something key
04:21
in the structure of the coming of age tale.
04:24
We watch the story unfold from two sides —
04:26
from the perspective of the teen and from the perspective of a parent learning to let
04:31
go.
04:32
“If you’re tired we can sit down.”
04:33
“I’m not tired.”
04:34
“You were dragging your feet.”
04:35
“You’re so infuriating.”
04:36
“Please stop yelling .”
04:37
“I’m not yelling.”
04:38
“Oh, it’s perfect!”
04:39
“Honey, do you love it?”
04:40
The result is a mother-daughter love story between Lady Bird and Marion.
04:44
What’s most compelling about this pair is how antagonistic
04:47
their relationship might look from the outside,
04:50
yet how bonded and attentive they are to each other.
04:53
“Does mom hate me?”
04:54
“You both have such strong personalities.”
04:58
Their relationship is what Gerwig is saying love looks like:
05:01
it’s not very pretty or perfect, but it perseveres.
05:10
Gerwig has said that Lady Bird is not autobiographical,
05:12
but she sets the story in familiar territory.
05:15
She grew up in suburban Sacramento, attended Catholic high school,
05:19
and moved to New York City.
05:20
One of her major inspirations in writing about Sacramento
05:23
was the writing of Northern Californian Joan Didion,
05:26
specifically, the 2003 essay collection “Where I Was From.”
05:30
Gerwig describes her discovery of Didion’s work as “spiritually seismic…
05:35
as shattering as if I’d grown up in Dublin and suddenly read James Joyce.”
05:39
Gerwig’s gift to the place that formed her is this intimate portrait of
05:43
“the Midwest of California,” as Lady Bird calls Sacramento.
05:47
“When I started writing the movie with the intention to make something about
05:51
what home means and what family means
05:54
and how it doesn’t really come into focus until you’re leaving.
05:58
Sacramento is where I grew up, so I felt like it had not been given its proper due in cinema.”
06:04
Finally, much of the story’s greatness comes down to the character of Lady Bird herself.
06:11
She’s larger-than-life in her brave self-assurance and determination to be herself,
06:16
whoever that is.
06:17
She’s kind of a badass.
06:19
“…and not expect everybody to do every — ah!”
06:22
Lady Bird represents how a lot of misfits or confused teens might have felt in high
06:26
school,
06:27
even if we didn’t all act on our impulses in the way she does.
06:30
And she reassures us that everything will turn out alright in the end.
06:34
Along with its many gifts, Lady Bird may resonate with viewers even more
06:38
due to the context of its release.
06:41
It comes at a time when women are openly challenging the kinds of male stories
06:45
that typically dominate the screen.
06:47
And in this politically contentious era,
06:49
it’s refreshing for so many people to agree on the quality of a film
06:53
that’s not only written, directed by and starring a woman,
06:56
but also about a female character like Lady Bird who forges her own path
07:01
and makes mistakes along the way.
07:02
Lady Bird’s positive impact will live on — sending a message to young women
07:06
that it’s okay to not have everything figured out —
07:09
even after you become an adult.
07:11
“Yeah, well, you know your mom’s tits?
07:13
They’re totally fake!”
07:14
“She made one bad decision at 19!”
07:16
“Two bad decisions!”
07:17
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