We are living through the golden age of the cinema of Sacramento. Oh, you didn’t know there was such a thing? There is. It’s new. Very new. In 2015, the Sacramento radio station NOW 100.5 could find only eight movies filmed in part in Sacramento over the previous 30 years, and in all of them it was used as a stand-in for somewhere else. But the California capital has served as a key location in two of the best movies of 2017.
The city is the home of Ben Stiller’s Brad, the protagonist of the terrific social comedy Brad’s Status, which I reviewed here just a few weeks ago. And Sacramento circa 2002 is the setting for Lady Bird, a semiautobiographical film written and directed by the actress Greta Gerwig. In both movies, the city comes in for a lot of abuse. Middle-aged Brad feels as though he is mired in a backwater as his old friends prosper in New York and Washington and Hollywood and Hawaii. And Christine, a Catholic high schooler in search of an identity who has chosen to call herself Lady Bird, longs for an East Coast college campus to escape the chokingly narrow confines of her native town.
Christine and Brad are both wrong about Sacramento, as the movies make clear. Brad has a good life in Sacramento that fits and suits him. Christine has an epiphany after she gets her driver’s license and sees the place through new eyes—a perspective she is desperate to share with her intensely critical mother Marion, whom she has a heartbreaking inability to satisfy.
As she tries on dresses for prom and Marion pooh-poohs each one, Christine is reduced to asking whether her mother even likes her. Marion, herself the daughter of an abusive alcoholic with no idea how to show affection to a daughter, declares she wants Christine to be the best version of herself she can be—which is like a dagger to the heart.
“You both have such strong personalities,” Christine’s loving and ineffectual father says to her to soothe her rage and upset. Just as Brad finds himself envying the seemingly limitless future of his own son, so does Marion take out her anxieties about her own life’s difficulties on her daughter. We see Marion showing kindness to almost everyone else in her life, so why are she and Christine like porcupines in a rumble?
When Marion accuses Christine of having no idea how much it’s cost them to raise her, she demands to know the amount “because I’m going to grow up and make a lot of money and pay you back so I never have to speak to you again.” To which Marion replies that she very much doubts Christine will ever be able to get a job good enough to do that.
The depiction of this fractious relationship is startlingly true and painfully aware, particularly as embodied by the luminous Saoirse Ronan (as Christine) and the definitive Laurie Metcalf (as Marion), and if that were the all of it, Lady Bird would still be one of the highlights of American moviemaking this year.
But it’s more. Lady Bird tells the story of Christine’s final year in high school, and it works as a kind of knowing gloss on John Hughes’s 1986 girl-goes-to-prom classic Pretty in Pink. Molly Ringwald’s Andie of Pretty in Pink is a poor kid who gazes longingly at the beautiful houses in her Chicago suburb; Christine and her friend walk home every day from their Catholic school through an affluent neighborhood so alluring to her that she later tells a new wealthy friend she lives in one of them and is humiliated when the truth comes out. But this is no Hughes movie; there are no villains here. Everybody is trying, struggling, just making do.
Christine dumps her lifelong friend to establish herself as the sidekick to the prettiest girl in school. Christine’s father goes for a job at an Internet start-up and finds himself competing for the position against his own son. The priest who stages the Sondheim musical in which Christine is cast plunges into despair when the high-school parents don’t understand the show (it’s Merrily We Roll Along, which almost nobody understands). The pretentious Howard Zinn-reading teenager who takes Christine’s virginity is callous toward her but is living with a father dying of cancer. And Marion must cope with the fact that her combatant, her best beloved, is leaving her.
“I just wish I could live through something,” Christine laments at the beginning of the movie after listening to the books-on-tape version of The Grapes of Wrath. By the end of Lady Bird, she has, and so have we, and it’s been wonderful.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic.
