Review: Lady Bird feels like a watershed moment for female audiences

REVIEW: Mothers get a warts-and-all heroine version of themselves. Daughters find a bold, smart character as mean as they are. This makes Lady Bird a watershed moment in cinema.

AS an actor, Greta Gerwig is mistress of the awkward moment.

Her self-absorbed characters’ social gaffes cause us to blush with shame.

At times, Gerwig’s on-screen persona is almost too raw to bear.

Stay with her for the duration, however, and the pay off is commensurately rewarding.

Gerwig’s characters resolve their ordinary, everyday crises with a very particular kind of grace (Frances Ha, which she co-wrote with her partner, the director Noah Baumbach, is a good example.)

Their ferocious appetite for life also helps to offset their abundant human flaws.

Saoirse Ronan in a scene from "Lady Bird." Picture: Merie Wallace/A24 via AP

Gerwig’s directorial debut as a feature filmmaker is similarly up close and personal.

Starring Irish American actor Saoirse Ronan as Gerwig’s on screen alter ego, it’s an unflinchingly intimate coming-of-age story about a senior high school student who can’t wait to escape the “suffocating” confines of suburban Sacramento circa 2002.

Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson, who has presumably renamed herself after US President Lyndon B. Johnson’s formidable wife, has a complex relationship with her outspoken mother (Laurie Metcalf) who pulls double shifts as a nurse to support the family in the wake of her husband’s (Tracy Letts) redundancy.

Overworked and over protective, Marion McPherson’s love, concern, anxiety for, and exasperation with, her youngest child, who has a rather inflated sense of her own self-importance, often translates as nagging and constant criticism.

Laurie Metcalf in a scene from the film Lady Bird. Picture: Universal Pictures.

Lady Bird, unsurprisingly, responds with insolence, impatience and ingratitude.

There is genuine affection in their relationship — played out, for example, in their shared shopping trips to thrift stores to up cycle prom dresses.

But it’s also volatile — during one fight, Lady Bird leaps out of a moving car, breaking her arm in the process.

She’s not the sort of girl to do things in half measures. And Marion is not the sort of woman to hold her tongue.

Lady Bird’s peer group relationships are similarly conflicted.

She doesn’t even try to conceal her lack of enthusiasm when her best friend Julie (Beanie Feldstein) wins the lead role in the school musical instead of her.

And the manner in which she later ditches Julie to join the cool gang is shockingly cavalier. (Gerwig deftly underplays their later reunion.)

Lady Bird ... “feels like a watershed moment for female audiences in general”. Picture: Universal Pictures.

Lady Bird’s romantic escapades — with a gay fellow student and a privileged malcontent — play out in a similarly unsentimental manner.

In the past, Gerwig has been described as Baumbach’s muse.

Here, she steps out of his shadow to further develop her own distinctive voice, a choice that has paid dividends for her personally with five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and one Golden Globe.

Lady Bird also feels like a watershed moment for female audiences in general, offering mothers a working, warts-and-all screen version of themselves that they actually recognise.

Their daughters will surely be emboldened by a lead character capable of acts as small and mean as they are, but who is also bold, smart, funny — and determined to take charge of her own destiny, mistakes included.

Saoirse Ronan, left, and Lucas Hedges in a scene from "Lady Bird." Picture: Merie Wallace/A24 via AP

LADY BIRD

Four stars

Director Greta Gerwig

Starring Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts

Rating M

Running time 94 minutes

Verdict Debut director takes flight

Opens on Thursday (February 15).

Originally published as Review: Lady Bird feels like a watershed moment for female audiences