The Freedom of Constraints in Lady Bird
Lady Bird is intentionally an understated movie. Music is used lightly; scenes are short and function as small vignettes of life. While its main character Christine “Lady Bird’’ is over dramatic, the film itself is surprisingly under dramatic. The cinematography isn’t flashy. The writing is stripped down to short conversations any teen girl and her mother have ever had; teen anxiety, bickering, boys, school, and the ever present horizons of freedom intermixed with the constant constraints of early adulthood. The collection of small scenes create an atmosphere so real, relatable, and unpresumptuous it’s only cinematic comparison can be its sister film Boyhood (2014). Both are grounded in character and normality of real life yet Lady Bird diverges from Boyhood by actually doing something with the grounded atmosphere it creates.
Director Greta Gerwig is too connected to reality to tell the story of the constrained girl desiring freedom against the dominating mother. She tells a better story. Lady Bird is a brat, but she wants more which we can empathize with. Her mother, Marion, has her own life and her own constraints; as the main breadwinner in the household she is burdened with the voice of reality and the constraints of middle class American life. Greta Gerwig gives the audience space to empathize with Marion just as much as Lady Bird. While often provoked by Marion, Lady Bird is on the ungrateful and inconsiderate end of many of the conflicts which, far from one dimensional, mirror the real moral and relational complexities of any adolescent parent dynamic; dreams, realities, responsibility, and the endless horizons and possibilities endemic to the late high school psyche.
The complexities Greta Gerwig sets up in the first two thirds of her film opens a window for the audience to enter the drama with their own experiences and their own stories. Lady Bird accomplishes this by pushing its characters to their narrative conclusion. The tension between Lady Bird and her mom causes a rift which is real and felt by the audience, but more importantly, it changes Lady Bird. Unlike Boyhood’s climax which lands flat, Lady Bird’s third act is both relational and moral grounded in the reality of its characters. Lady Bird is now Christine, no pretensions. Finally accepting her name, she calls her mother essentially accepting her past, accepting Sacramento, apologizing for resenting her childhood with gratefulness. All of this is catalyzed by a transcendent religious experience, a church choir. All this rings true because we have come to understand why Christine has resented her childhood, we’ve come to sympathize with her dreams and yet the audience is now changed as it accepts her ultimate transformation of accepting the very things she tried to reject.
People resonate with narratives that tell the truth. Narrative is one of the few means by which we get insight into how the big questions of life connect to our own stories. Lady Bird connects to us because it understands that what human beings want most is union. We desire reconciliation with ourselves, with people, and ultimately with God. The question is, how do we reconcile, how do we reconcile, “When terrible things have happened to us all” to quote Friedrich Beuckner.
Lady bird doesn’t directly answer this question, it can’t point to a moment and say ah ha! there it is. It avoids answering the question because how we change can’t be boiled down into a formula. The closest it gets to is beauty. A church choir on a lazy Sunday morning meets a hungover lost girl in New York, capturing her soul and calling her back to herself — along with all the constraints of being born with a body, a history, and a place.
There’s something mysterious about this. Our modern narratives (specifically) the late waves of Feminism decree the capacity to chart one’s own path without constraints. There’s an inherent moral logic to this anthropological constellation; that we as human beings are autonomous agents capable of self actualized narrative creation — we create ourselves, we choose the story we become. Lady Bird giving herself her own name, in defiance of her given name, embodies this posture.
Lady Bird’s return to her own name isn’t exactly a vote for conservatism from Greta Gerwig, but it is a sidestep away from modern mainstream adolescent narratives (see Booksmart). In accepting who she is, a specific person with a specific history, a specific name, with specific parents she tells the truth and ultimately reconciles to her mother and herself. For Lady Bird demonstrates that we know ourselves when we accept who we are — with what’s left of us after all the pretensions have been stripped away.
