Critics reviews

Gerwig gives us a portrait of a young girl in a genre of movies so often populated by boys’ stories. The film succeeds in both showing the subtleties of her character as a young woman and in giving real detail to the characters who surround her.

Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird is populated by actors who, like Gerwig herself, can do no wrong. That enhances the film’s goody-goody quality, which falls over the movie like a warm blanket.

While there is an acute authorial intelligence informing the transitions between scenes, the steady trot of clipped vignettes comes to seem monotonous and somewhat evasive. . . . None of this is accidental; Gerwig is too smart a writer to coincidentally open a movie of deflections and escapes with a scene of dramatic conflict avoidance. The sense of retreat is true to the film's central character; it's simply that I wish the director would, just once, give pursuit.

You stole my life! Greta Gerwig wails at the climax of MISTRESS AMERICA. . . . I came out of LADY BIRD, Gerwig's solo directorial debut, and expressed much the same sentiment. It's not just that the story is set in Sacramento, the town where I grew up, or that its central character, Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), yearns to escape high school in the Operation Iraqi Freedom winter of 2003, a year before I graduated. Every single detail in this movie is right.

Watching Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird in a cinema offers something rare: being part of an audience as it discovers a fantastic talent. It swiftly becomes clear that every scene, every performance is going to land, and the communal joy keeps increasing. It isn't Gerwig's first outing as a director or as a screenwriter, but her prior efforts were co-credits. Lady Bird is all hers.

Gerwig's characters bristle with honesty and her open-hearted sincerity endear them to audiences alike everywhere. It is no surprise that Lady Bird is A24's highest grossing feature. We can all relate to having a dream and chasing that opportunity. We're lucky that Greta Gerwig seems to have accomplished hers.

The movie is about reconciliation, and in its world view reconciliation involves recognizing who your blood is. It means finally understanding that it's a shitty thing to tell your mother that you will pay her back all the money she spent on your upbringing just so that you yourself may have the privilege of never having to speak to her again. . . . Directorially, Gerwig never puts a foot wrong. Lady Bird is very assured and very much believes in the effects it wants to achieve.

Will I ever forgive the movie for getting Dave Matthews Band's "Crash Into Me" re-stuck in my head after so many years of denial over my love for that song, or for reminding me, in a very pointed way, of what it was like to feel like a failure and a dweeb in high school who just wanted to escape? Nope! Too real—which is a sign the movie is onto something. When it ended, I relished the feeling that I had seen someone grow up before my eyes. Most of all, though, I simply wanted to keep watching.

Gerwig understands that one of the most important parts of growing up is learning to think about people other than yourself. After reading Lady Bird's college application essay, the principal (Lois Smith) observes that her love of Sacramento came across loud and clear. Lady Bird responds that she wasn't trying to express love: all she did was "pay attention." This is Gerwig's gift as a writer and as a director. She knows that love and paying attention are essentially the same thing.

Gerwig isn't a particularly showy director — though she makes the big moments count — but her one devastatingly effective touch is to sketch the film through deft little mini-montages that capture the essence of a location or a situation without dwelling for too long. It's like she has a notebook full of vivid anecdotes to share and a larger picture emerges from them, like pointillist filmmaking.

Gerwig proceeds with a self-assurance, but unlike her young protagonist she has both a clear vision of the result she wants and a command of the tools to achieve it. Lady Bird ends with its heroine making a small, uncharacteristically humble gesture that suggests she's finally ready to grow up and become the woman she was meant to be. Greta Gerwig is already there.

Gerwig's restrained direction emerges from the very ideas in the film. The aesthetic of "Lady Bird," its emotional and dramatic legibility, is a realism of morality, an utterly uncynical but clear-eyed sense of the responsibilities that come with the kind of money that it takes to make such a film, the kind of stylistic and tonal expectations that a movie of this sort creates and should fulfill in order for it to take its place in the field—and for Gerwig to take her apt place there along with it.