Lady Bird has been in release since November and it has received numerous amounts of critical praise and awards including winning the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy. The question is, does it live up to all its praise? The answer is a resounding yes.
It stars Saoirse Ronan as the titular character, a senior at a Catholic high school going through her final year of high school and trying to figure out who she is. She very much has a strained relationship with her mother (Laurie Metcalf, in a remarkable supporting performance) though her relationship with her dad is much better.
Lady Bird endures all the trials and tribulations that come with high school including dating and focusing on goals once it’s over. She also has two relationships with boys during her senior year (Lucas Hedges and Timothee Chalamet) and also auditions for the school play.
She also experiences a great deal of popularity among some new friends and that puts yet another strain on her with her BFF (Beanie Feldstein). This Bird can’t win for losing.
With a wonderful performance from Ronan and a terrific supporting cast, this film is at once funny, poignant, and insightful. We really go through the trials and tribulations of Ronan’s character and it is played with such an authentic approach every step of the way. Writer/director Greta Gerwig certainly captures not only the time period but also the simultaneous feelings of hope, despair, tragedy, and optimism that comes with being an 18-year-old.
Being as this film centers around the senior year of high school in the early 2000s, it resonated deeply with me and where I was and what I was hoping life could be for me.
This is a movie that presents the ups and downs of teenage life that seems real and relatable.
Grade: A-
(Rated R for language, sexual content, brief graphic nudity, and teen partying.)
