Adorkable No More

Lady Bird marks the arrival of a major directorial talent.

- David Edelstein

EVERYTHING COMES together for Greta Gerwig in her marvelous solo directorial debut, Lady Bird, in which Saoirse Ronan plays a Sacramento 17-year-old named Christine McPherson who adopts the titular nom de guerre as a way to launch her own flittery persona. It’s a flittery movie, too, but with soul: Gerwig has a gift for skipping along the surface of her teenage alter ego’s life and then going deep—quickly, without fuss—before skipping forward again, evoking the tempo of a life lived whimsically but over an emotional abyss.

You’ll recall the flittering persona from Gerwig’s collaboration with Noah Baumbach Frances Ha, in which she played the title role. Greta Gerwig playing Greta Gerwig is Greta Gerwig squared: ecstasy for some, too much adork ability for others. You would never call Saoirse Ronan adorkable. She’d break your nose. Her Lady Bird is big, at times theatrical, but there’s no eye-rolling or face-pulling, no mixing up the character’s exhibitionism with her depth of feeling. Ronan’s accent is American, but there’s Irish in her rhythms, in the way she drives her lines home and turns every full stop into an ellipsis, a fierce demand for more.

Central to Christine/Lady Bird’s ongoing crisis of identity is her mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf), who has to work more and more hours as a nurse when her husband, Larry (Tracy Letts), loses his job. One moment, mother and daughter are tight, weeping in the car over an audio book of The Grapes of Wrath (!); the next, Marion has turned on Lady Bird, pouring all her anxiety and self-doubt into her daughter’s head to the point where the girl throws herself out of the moving car.