Review of Lady Bird (2017) by Jluis_001 — 28 Dec 2017

One more case in which I must row against the current and discover something that a person who had already seen this movie told me, apparently you cannot give a negative opinion about this film and considering what I have seen now that I have finished it, I will undoubtedly be crucified by many, but being quite honest for everything they mentioned about it and the huge avalanche of positive reviews it received, in my personal opinion, Lady Bird is one of the biggest disappointments of the year and yes, is perhaps the most overrated movie of the year along with Get Out.

Lady Bird tells the story of Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson, a young woman who lives in Sacramento in 2002, regardless of certain narrative resources that the movie does not need to use, like social networks and smartphones, the time frame in which the film takes place it couldn't have been more irrelevant.

My biggest problem has to do with the main character and when something like that happens, you know it's serious, personally my adolescence flew away many years ago, but for me now as then it would be quite clear to expose Christine as a spoiled, selfish and narcissist brat that at all times and in all situations, she only thinks about herself. Everyone is wrong except her. She also lives complaining about the life she has while doing nothing to change her environment beyond the fact the she's trying to enter an out of state college just to leave the place where she feels locked up, not caring at all that her parents are facing financial problems and have made it clear that supporting her financially is not an option, but she doesn't care because like in many other coming of age films, the ''teenagers'' believe they are being repressed in their place of origin and so their talents are not properly exploited. Cliché and repetitive.

The true strength of the film and the story in general lies in everything that surrounds her, that's the best reason to see Lady Bird because most of those characters have more serious problems and forge what she does regardless of whether she believes that's not the case, starting with her mother and her father, it's true that her mother presses too much, but come on, you have to be honest, it's not like Lady Bird leaves her with so many options with her childish tantrums.

Her father is unemployed and struggling with depression trying to provide for her family and yet Lady Bird's concerns lie in what she will do, avoiding helping in any way.

Her boyfriend, her best friend, the guy with whom she loses her virginity, her momentary and popular friend, her adopted brother and her girlfriend, all form a protective halo in a narrative mode because it's the conflicts of those characters what sustain this movie, otherwise Lady Bird wouldn't have been more than just a movie of another teenager incapable of deciding what she hopes to do with her life and that situation has is been seen already too many times in both cinema and real life.

The film gets recomposed in its final section where the character absorbs a bit of maturity and enters a new stage of her life, the ending makes it clear but until that point we can only infer what will be of her in the future and perhaps she will become a better person and certainly then she could have been a better character, but it wasn't the case and for me that diminished my enjoyment and enthusiasm for the film in a big way.

I admit that Saoirse Ronan does a good job, but on front of such script, unfortunately the character doesn't stop being annoying. She manages to give it a little more strength for being a great actress, otherwise I think that the character would have been lost miserably.

Greta Gerwing delivers a film that looks good, that has an uneven but sustained rhythm. She manages to take her first film to a safe harbor but if she really wants to continue making films as a filmmaker, she needs stronger scripts.