Lady Bird review

Lady Bird is a coming of age story about a teenager who attends a Catholic school and fights with her mom. She’s blazingly confident about life, despite not fully knowing the point of her life.

She and her mom drive eac h other crazy. They go from crying over a heartwarming story to screaming about college in mere seconds. Lady Bird jumps out of the car rather than listen to her mother lecturing her, then later asks her to go dress shopping with her.

They tour real estate and pretend to be rich. They understand each other as they laugh, cry, and slam doors. Lady Bird is clearly a daddy’s girl, but she is so much like her mother. Just as her mom nitpicks faults and delivers sharp little remarks, Lady Bird can both start a fight and finish it with a grand finale.

Different scales, same game.

What I love about this movie is it’s not trying to drive home some moralistic theme. When Lady Bird lies or steals or cheats, it’s not this big dramatic will she/won’t she get caught scenario. She doesn’t always care about doing the right thing.

She’s a teenager. She selfish and confused and frustrated and oh so blindly confident.

This movie doesn’t shy away the faults in human nature. Lady Bird certainly has her flaws, as do her parents and friends. She makes mistakes and readily admits it. She apologizes tearfully to her parents after screaming sessions and genuinely wants them to be proud of her. She tries to meet their expectations, even while determinedly busting through life at her own pace, searching for her place in the world.

She goes through phases of how she wants to discover herself.

She slacks off with her best friend, dates the star of the musical, and writes violent messages to her mother on her pink cast. Then things start to unwind. She walks in on her boyfriend kissing a boy and after she and Julie have a sob session to their favorite song, she approaches life from a different angle.

She befriends the most popular girl in school and loses her virginity to an artistic poser with too many books and not enough original opinions. She plays pranks at school instead of just blowing off class and snacking on unblessed crackers. She gets suspended, busted by her parents, busted by her pet popular friend, and takes her sparkly pink dress to Julie instead of the cool kids.

I love how when she asks Julie why she’s crying, Julie tells her that some people just aren’t born happy. I especially love how Lady Bird accepts this answer and comforts her without pushing her, letting her be sad until she’s ready to be happy. They dance at prom, scandalize the nuns, and pick up where they left off in their friendship.

Just in time for college.

While her mother has been planning on Lady Bird going to a local college, staying in California with her family and not going to the city that has just been bombed by terrorists, Lady Bird has other plans.

Lady Bird has been obsessing and planning and dreaming over this idea of “Yale, but not Yale” and the cultured East Coast. She moves across the country with her father’s help and her mother’s silence, discovers that college freshmen are pretty much the same level of stupid at all colleges, reads her mother’s unfinished and unsent letters, and goes to mass.

She rediscovers her love for her home, her family, her upbringing and beliefs. She scoffed at her mother, insulted her brother, made her father drop her off around the corner from school, then got suspended for openly denying her school’s beliefs.

She’s dished out her fair share of rejection.

Despite all this, she realizes that maybe her mom was right. Maybe she could be a better version of herself. Maybe she could love her parents equally, and even love her hometown. Maybe she could say thank you without first saying sorry.

She’s alone in a new city and it forces her to look inward and discover that perhaps she could be Christine after all, and leave Lady Bird home.