‘Lady Bird’ Feels Too Flawed to Fly

I’m not sure what I was expecting of Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, and perhaps, as they say, expectation really is the root of all heartache. Still, after hearing rave review after rave review, I found myself scratching my head when the final credits rolled and I felt like I had missed “it,” whatever “it” was supposed to have been. It seems that this movie’s magic was completely lost on me.

Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson is a typical angsty high school teenager. The root of all her problems, it seems, is the omnipresence of her hardened, disapproving mother, though her father tries hard to soften their relationship. He tries to shed light on his wife’s traumatic life, and he even goes behind her back to assist Lady Bird in applying to East Coast colleges. Christine has insisted that everyone call her “Lady Bird,” on the stance that is a name “given to me, by me,” but this declaration comes at the beginning of the movie with very little fanfare or reason. It seemed quirky for the sake of being quirky.

There is nothing unique about Lady Bird’s teen drama. Lady Bird trades in her loyal, lifelong best friend for the popular bad girl, she chases a boy that has marginal interest in her. She has sex, she smokes pot. She continues to fight with her mother. While Lady Bird is at least allowed to be somewhat self-aware (she only fawns over the boy for a little while), and while she does the right thing in the end by taking back her best friend, I didn’t really feel that much growth in her, or the story itself. The trajectory is predictable, and the narrative felt disjointed. There were too many subplots popping up in its periphery that quite frankly seemed too important to gloss over, and would have given the movie some more ballast. Lady Bird’s mother, for example, mentions offhand that her own mother was an abusive alcoholic, and while this helps explain her difficult relationship with Lady Bird, it’s really the only sympathetic morsel she gets.

Lady Bird has an older, adoptive brother, who is living at home with his surly, terse girlfriend, but their presence/story adds nothing to the narrative except more confusion. It takes too long to piece together his story, and his presence remains too incidental to really care about him. The school’s lead drama teacher drops out of the story unexpectedly and without explanation. We seem him readily crying in an exercise geared to help his student actors learn to cry on cue, and then in the next scene he is at the same psychiatric hospital where Lady Bird’s mother works, pleading her not to tell Lady Bird where he has gone. This is not to overlook Lady Bird’s father, who is unemployed and living with some serious depression in the film’s background. Lady Bird’s mother is working double shifts to support the family, but still seems to get no slack.

When the movie was all said and done, I felt the least empathy for Lady Bird. Let’s not forget that at the story’s beginning Lady Bird throws herself out of her mother’s moving car as they are on the way home from an extended tour of possible colleges. Perhaps I am simply too old to find this stunt cute, especially as the next scene shows that she has scribbled “fuck mom” on her cast, or perhaps it’s that I felt like we leave her just as entitled and immature as we found her roadside. She goes off to college and almost immediately ends up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning, though upon release we witness her standing in the street calling her parents to thank them for “everything,” in that cliched movie way. This is how the movie ends, and it is not enough to forgive her.

Lady Bird felt like a pet project, and while it was mostly watchable, something felt off-kilter in a way that never resolved itself. I don’t think the performances were bad, in fact Laurie Metcalf was great. But as a whole the movie felt forced and wobbly. I spent the entire ninety minutes trying to identify the squeaky wheel. There are better movies that do teenage quirkiness much more originally and articulately.

*Featured photo credit: Michael Gilliam