Lady Bird: Beauty In Simplicity

Christian Gentolia
Feb 6, 2018
2 min read

Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird gives us one of the most endearing stories put on the silver screen in 2017. The film follows high school senior Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) as she traverses pressure from family and friends in preparation for college. The film is barely longer than 90 minutes yet we feel like we have also gone through a whole year of stress with Lady Bird.

The main thing to note about this film is that it feels immensely real. The interactions between Lady Bird with her friends, the plights she goes through during school, the guilt she feels were all conveyed so that we feel the exact same way. There weren't any crazy filmmaking techniques or gimmicks that other lesser films would rely on to share a simple story. This film lets us witness what Lady Bird feels in these moments and brings us back to the time when these moments were most important.

The cast of this film deserves any and all awards for their performances. Ronan's character grew so much within an hour and a half. It was such a joy to see her mature over the film's runtime. Ronan displayed how headstrong Lady Bird could be against her mother but also her vulnerability with her different friend groups. Laurie Metcalf was remarkable as Lady Bird's mother, Marion. The audience feels how badly Marion's heart hurts when Lady Bird sought out-of-state colleges knowing she could not afford it. So many conversations between the two characters had a gravitas on-screen that it not only felt like conversations between a mother and daughter but they were so compelling that you wanted and needed resolution between the two.

Greta Gerwig wrote and directed this wonderful film. Every moment in the story played an important part in a later time. Something as simple as being dropped off a block from school would have an emotional resonance during an argument later in the film. The film was also amazingly funny. So many times my friends and I had to control ourselves because the humor was so well-placed and natural. The cinematography was well-done. The warm color palette provided a soft nature to the film and allowed us to better immerse ourselves. The closeups of reactions and the lack of cutting allowed visceral authenticity of the story to shine through. The shot of Laurie Metcalf in the car does not cut for such a long time that I also cried as she began to cry.

Lady Bird is one of the best, if not the best, films I have seen in 2017. The story was simple yet told beautifully. I should not be able to relate to a Sacramento girl but I saw so much of myself as she went through her tribulations. Films like these show us that filmmaking, at its core, can and will make us feel everything on the emotional spectrum.