Review: Lady Bird

Wilful teenager Christine AKA Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) squabbles with her no-nonsense mother (Laurie Metcalf), oscillates between two very different boys (Timothee Chalamet and Lucas Hedges), and is kind of an all-round snarky bitch to everyone. Lois Smith plays a nun at Christine’s Catholic school, Tracy Letts is Christine’s sad-sack father.

Well-acted, rather brief semi-autobiographical drama from 2017 doesn’t ultimately have anything else of note to it unless being written and directed by a woman – actress Greta Gerwig – is of any particular speciality to you. Otherwise it’s a pleasant, likeable film with nothing in the way of surprises or substantiality to help linger terribly long in the memory.

The script is the issue for me, it’s so clichéd and archaic that you can see where it’s all headed long before its wilful main character does. Hell, for a long time I found myself wondering if it was going to get anywhere at all, so perhaps I should’ve been happy that it finally did, predictable or not. I mean, it was nice and all but…much ado about not a helluva lot, to horribly paraphrase The Bard.

Saoirse Ronan is immediately perfect (except perhaps being a touch too old) in the immediately unlikeable title role. It’s to her and the film’s credit that you’re not so put-off by her bitchiness that you tune out. She gets one genuinely funny moment telling off a woman giving a boring speech about abortion. That was so mean, but funny. Ronan’s douchebag musician boyfriend also earns a few laughs, and Lois Smith and Laurie Metcalf are excellent support.

I wish I liked this more. It’s OK, but nothing you’ve not seen before and not as good as it thinks it is. The cast are all pretty terrific, but that ultimately isn’t quite enough to get this one over the line. Overrated in the extreme (like Gerwig herself, perhaps?), and I could’ve done without the football coach character, a one-joke idea driven into the ground before his second appearance. Ugh.

Rating: C+