As far as coming-of-age movies go, none of them stand out quite like Greta Gerwig’s Oscar-nominated Lady Bird (2017) and if you’re in the minority of people who haven’t seen it yet, my question to you is very simple: where have you been?!
If you’re a Max subscriber then you’ve probably seen Lady Bird floating around its catalog of movies for a while, but it’ll soon run its course with the streaming platform as it will be gone by the end of June. Heartbreaking I know, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles with the best streaming services.
Out of all the titles leaving Max this month Lady Bird is one of the best Max movies that you have to catch for a number of reasons in spite of my own bias. In addition to its near-perfect 99% Rotten Tomatoes score from the critics, Lady Bird is an easy 90-minute watch with simple yet effective storytelling that’s not complicated for the sake of it. Plus, Saoirse Ronan as the leading lady? Yes please.
A strong start to what will be a long career
From the writer and director behind Barbie (2023), which is one of the best Max movies, Gerwig emerged as a serious filmmaker with her solo directorial debut Lady Bird after writing and starring in Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2012). There’s no doubt that the success of her debut skyrocketed Gerwig into stardom, who has since become one of the leading female names in the film industry.
When it comes to Lady Bird, its story and message is very simple. Set during the years of the early ‘00s Ronan is a rebellious Catholic school girl with the self-given name Lady Bird. Her determination to escape her small Sacramento hometown for a college education on the east coast drives a wedge between her and her mother (Laurie Metcalf), with whom her relationship is already rather rocky.
Over the course of its 90-minute runtime, we see her grapple with her final days as a high school student navigating the world of romance, friendship, and identity, all while experiencing family hardships behind closed doors which fuels her ambition to leave.
Lady Bird is a character study for the ages
Story is one of those elements that separates a good movie from a great movie, but when you have a bold and established character at the forefront it can take a movie to another level. While the story behind Lady Bird is uncomplicated and simple, it makes room for the main character to shine through.
What sets Lady Bird apart from other coming-of-age stories is its focus on those major life moments that every watcher has experienced and therefore can relate to, and it packs even more of a punch when it comes from a character from a financially-challenged family. But my absolute favorite element of Lady Bird is the portrayal of a complicated mother-daughter relationship, which reveals the good, bad, and ugly sides to that particular evolutionary stage of a parent and child bond. It’ll make you laugh, and it’ll certainly make you cry.
Overall, Lady Bird does a clever job of portraying the life-changing transition from adolescence into young adulthood through its series of chapters that mark a significant change in the main character’s journey – all leading up to a monumental change of attitude in the final moments of the movie.
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