‘Lady Bird’ Is A Film That No One Can Dislike

LADY BIRD

Lady Bird famously held a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating for months. This doesn’t mean it’s some cinematic masterpiece (it’s definitely not), more that it’s a film no one can dislike.

Greta Gerwig —who, it should be noted, previously co-directed 2008’s Nights And Weekends with Joe Swanberg— moves behind the camera for her first solo directorial feature, a shaggy-dog teen-movie set in 2002, in her hometown of Sacramento. Gerwig wanted the film to “feel like a memory”, but it feels more like a coming-of-age flick: the familiar beats of adolescent rebellion, overbearing mothers, fights with best friends, declarations of puppy love, unexciting first sexual experiences, drunken disasters, searching for self-identity, the ever-present desire to get out of your stultifying home-town.

The universality of these experiences —of living through them as teenagers, even witnessing them play out again as parent— gives Lady Bird a strong currency of identifiability, no matter the age of the audience. It may be a mere ‘mother/daughter drama’, once something Hollywood would’ve considered too ‘minor’ a narrative for a prestige picture, but this film will, if not feel like a memory, at least bring back memories for anyone who watches it (extra bonus points if you came-of-age circa the turn-of-the-century, of course).

What makes Lady Bird truly beloved —and acclaimed— is its eye for odd detail, the way warm familiarity is shot through with cute idiosyncrasy. There’s “hella” as awkwardly-adopted slang. Communion wafers as snacks. Homecoming slow-dances where kids are instructed to leave a gap between bodies, “six inches for the Holy Spirit”. Parents and teachers who’re depressed, dying, unemployed, and, worst of all, forced to sit through terrible high-school musicals. Dave Matthews is earnestly embraced. And the letters Gerwig wrote to Matthews, Justin Timberlake, and Alanis Morrissette about using their music now live publicly online.

Gerwig’s handwritten requests to stars for their ‘of-the-era’ jams are plenty charming, as is the footage of her on set, yelling directions to stars Saoirse Ronan and Lucas Hedges, midway into making a falling-in-love montage. This is no small thing for a small film out to crash Hollywood's night of nights. Upstart pics trying to take it to the Dunkirks of the world are, when campaigning, often charged with undertaking —like some military manoeuvre— a “charm offensive”. This cute phrase speaks to the greater status of Lady Bird, the “universal acclaim” that persists online, with nary a backlash to be seen.

Oscar-contender films no longer exist in isolation, but have their meaning and worth bounced through the endless echo chamber of the internet. Which, for Lady Bird, has meant the world to its awards-season success. Just as the film itself is liberal with its charms, Gerwig —as seen in her own acting work, from her mumblecore beginnings through Noah Baumbach collaborations— is a charmer. Thus, the modern-day conflation of art with artist is a boon for this picture, and its Academy Award potential. It’s charming, Gerwig is charming, you'll be charmed, and so may the AMPAS voters be charmed, en masse.

In this, Lady Bird is notable for the way there have been no notable voices of dissent, no contrary takes running a counter narrative. It’s no cinematic masterpiece, but, man, do people love it. At a time in which even a Star Wars movie can engender hostility and division, Lady Bird is a work of joyful unification.

STRONGER

The best moments in Stronger come when screenwriter John Pollono and director David Gordon Green beat back against the generic template of what this film clearly is: Inspirational Oscarbait. It’s there in the premise: this is a based-on-a-true-story prestige pic about Jeff Bauman, who survived the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, but lost both of his legs in the blast. Bauman became a posterchild for the slogan that reigned, locally, in the wake of tragedy: Boston Strong; something the flick’s title duly echoes.

But Green’s film fights off the simplicity of this to-screen translation, refusing to simply tick the boxes as work of rote inspirationalism. Nothing in its early stretches —folksy Masshole locals yammering away in a sports-bar watching the Redsox, bringing back cinematic memories of The Fighter— suggests that Stronger is going to dodge the obvious, but that it does.

For, when Bauman (played by Jake Gyllenhaal, who is great but not quite Nightcrawler impressive) is turned into a symbol of resilience, a human embodiment of not letting the terrorists win, he greets it with cynicism and pissiness; feeling as if every publicity request and spontaneous ‘can I get a picture with you?’ photo-op is somewhere between grotesque and horrifying. Not only did he lose his legs, but now, everywhere he goes, he’s forced to relive the worst day of his life as if it was the best.

Instead of being ‘inspiring’, he’s depressed, drunk, angry, combative; surrounded by a host of loudmouth relatives equal parts zany and obnoxious. Green (whose CV is, by this point, really just all over the place) is unafraid of showing the grim, daily realities of adjusting to life without legs, of the quotidian struggles that come when you’re suddenly wheelchair bound but can’t afford to —or just stubbornly won’t— move out of a tiny, shoebox, second-floor apartment.

Eventually, of course, the inspirationalism comes, on close: with gained perspective, Pedro Martínez cameo, swelling string music, shared humanity. The fact that Stronger pushes against this eventuality makes the climax, when it finally arrives, pay off. Delaying the ‘gratification’ of giving the audience what they paid for only gins up the emotion, lets the obligatory cresting finale feel not perfunctory, but as if it’s been hard-earnt, by both character and audience.

A FANTASTIC WOMAN

Sebastian Lélio’s glorious Gloria follow-up is unexpectedly classical: a grand, glamorous, sumptuous, matinée-worthy melodrama depicted in bold tones of vivid cinemascope colour. In many ways, this mise-en-scène —the work of Lélio and DOP Benjamín Echazarreta— lures you into the mind of its leading character. She’s the titular woman, a trans femme who spends her life on the arm of a wealthy older man, singing in Santiago nightclubs.

A Fantastic Woman’s fantasy world —its lurid colours, its dream logic, its moments of surrealism and pure cinematic flourish, its at-times-gorgeous score from Matthew Herbert— is also Lélio’s attempt to author something the tonal opposite of social-realism. This aesthetic choice was a way of making a tragic tale about a trans character without it feeling like what Sean Baker —maker of another notable trans picture, Tangerine— mockingly calls “plight of” movies. This is a film in which its character’s gender identity is central to the story, but not a film that’s some Oscar-pandering crusade, a message movie.

Once we meet its central character, Marina (played, memorably, by Daniela Vega), soon the glittering façade of this fantastic world begins to crack. Her older lover (Francisco Reyes) dies, suddenly, of an aneurysm, in the first act. And, whilst the look of the film suggests its lead sees herself as the star of her own tragic romance, there’s no glamour when the horrors of reality soon start corroding her this dreamworld.

The police are suspicious that, as trans woman with an older man, she was being paid for sex. She’s submitted to a humiliating bodily examination by the detective on the case. In Chile, she can’t legally change her identity, so her gender expression is forever in question, unofficial, up for debate. And, mostly, she’s forced to deal with boorish, bigoted relatives of her late beau, who’re intent to knock her down, humiliate her. In being denied her status as grieving would-be widow —kicked out of her ex-lover’s house, intimidated into not attending the funeral, demonised as the ‘thing’ who took a grand patriarch to the grave— she is turned into a stain on the family name, far removed from the glam dame of the title.

Eventually, our heroine stands defiant; the film essentially dramatising the trans experience of standing undaunted in the face of daily humiliations, widespread ignorance, ongoing judgment. In such, A Fantastic Woman is both tragic and triumphant, a grim drama that is often funny. Lélio’s remarkable film makes the most of these contradicitions: not just between fantasy and reality, fantastical and realist, but between being crowdpleasing and confrontational, sweet and strident, cinematically classical yet strikingly modernist.