Lady Bird

Lady Bird looks like a very simple film.

That is exactly what makes it so difficult to achieve.

There is no huge plot, mystery or extraordinary adventure. There is a teenager finishing high school, arguing with her mother, changing friends, falling for people, making mistakes, trying to discover who she wants to be and dreaming of leaving Sacramento.

Nothing exceptional.

Everything important.

Greta Gerwig understands perfectly that at that age the smallest things can occupy your entire universe.

Christine decides to call herself Lady Bird because even her name feels like something she should be allowed to choose. She wants to study far away. She wants another world, another life, another version of herself.

She wants to become somebody before she really knows who she is.

Saoirse Ronan is wonderful.

She never plays an idealized teenager. Lady Bird can be charming and selfish, funny and hurtful, completely confident one moment and entirely lost the next.

She is contradictory.

Like a real person.

That is what makes the character so good.

Gerwig does not need us to approve of everything she does. She simply watches a seventeen-year-old try on different identities while attempting to discover which one actually fits.

Sometimes she hurts people along the way.

Including herself.

The relationship with her mother is probably the heart of the film.

Laurie Metcalf is extraordinary.

Mother and daughter can move from affection to open conflict within a single sentence because each knows exactly where the other is vulnerable. They love each other deeply and, partly because of that intimacy, can hurt each other deeply too.

Gerwig understands something important: in some families, love and conflict are not opposites.

They exist together.

Her mother sees a daughter who still needs protection.

Lady Bird sees a mother preventing her from becoming the person she imagines.

Both are right.

Both are wrong.

Money is handled just as beautifully. Lady Bird is embarrassed by her house, her neighborhood and the things her family cannot afford. She looks at other people's homes and imagines a different life inside them.

The film never needs a speech about class.

It is there in a conversation.

A lie.

The desire to make somebody believe you live somewhere else.

That is excellent writing.

The friendships and early romances are equally convincing. Nobody arrives simply to teach Lady Bird an important lesson. People enter her life, become enormously important for a while, and sometimes stop being important later.

That is how life works.

And all of this fits into little more than ninety minutes.

Almost nothing feels unnecessary.

Gerwig ends scenes where other directors would still be explaining them. She trusts a gesture, a look or a cut. The editing has remarkable precision, turning small fragments into the feeling of an entire year.

The film is also genuinely funny without turning its characters into jokes.

That balance is incredibly difficult.

Sacramento eventually becomes essential too. Lady Bird spends most of the film wanting to escape it. The city represents everything small, familiar and limiting that she believes she must leave behind before her real life can begin.

Then comes one of the film's most beautiful realizations: sometimes we only understand how much we love a place after leaving it.

Sacramento has not changed.

She has.

Perhaps that is part of growing up.

Realizing that some of the things we wanted to escape were also part of who we were.

Lady Bird is about high school, a mother and daughter, friendship, money, first relationships and a girl desperate to leave her hometown.

Nothing we have not seen before.

And yet I have rarely seen it done this well.

Without spectacle.

Without grand speeches.

Without constantly announcing its importance.

It is so simple that it looks easy.

It is so beautifully made that it becomes perfect.