Review of Lady Bird (2017) by Connor S — 30 Jan 2018

Coming of age movies must have been beaten to death by now. They're such an easy and universal topic to make movies out of, I couldn't even count how many of those movies exist. Yet somehow, there still manages to be a director every now and again that puts out a coming of age movie that's fresh. In her directorial debut, Greta Gerwig shows that she's one of those directors.

What makes Lady Bird stand out from other movies like it is how personal it is. Like the main character, Gerwig actually grew up in Sacramento, California in the early 2000s. I don't know how much of the movie she experienced in real life, but Lady Bird strikes me as an honest reflection. The title character, as charismatic as she is, has very poor judgment and is self-centered. The adults are not just out of touch villains, but rather fully-fledged characters with their own motivations and conflicts. Yes, the movie hits the same story beats as nearly every other coming of age movie, but it gives the impression that Gerwig is taking a serious look back at her youth.

There are a host of film-making techniques that help convey this movie's heart and soul. Near the beginning and the end, we're shown a number of different montages. In the middle, the montages go away, but each scene is so concise that the whole movie is like one big montage. Even though the movie is only an hour and a half long, each scene conveys the maximum information in what little time it has so that the movie doesn't feel short. It's almost like looking through a scrapbook of old photographs and reliving their memories. The grainy picture quality contributes to this experience, giving the movie an old, faded look. That unique style is one of the many reasons this movie is so great. In a genre saturated with films, Lady Bird soars.