LADY BIRD (2017)

Rated:  R

STARS:  Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts, Lucas Hedges
DIRECTOR: Greta Gerwig
GENRE: Comedy/Drama

The gap between who we are and who we aspire to be never looms larger than during the waning days of high school, when we courageously decide to follow our dreams...or not. Lady Bird is a coming-of-age tale that almost aspires to be a musical--sort of a cross between Pretty In Pink and Glee. 

Lady Bird (the girl--whose real name is Christine), is on the cusp of graduation, and has ambitions beyond her local Sacramento area colleges, where her obsessive and controlling mom (Laurie Metcalf) wants her to go. The girl has set her sights on some prominent east coast schools, and the conflict this sets up between mother and daughter is at the heart of Greta Gerwig's impressive directorial debut. They have a complicated bond. They can be fighting one minute and the next going ga-ga together over a dress Christine is trying on. Lady Bird also has to contend with a snarky brother and his girlfriend, who provide some deadpan comic relief in the midst of tense situations. And then there's the issue of losing her virginity, which she seems determined to accomplish before moving onto "bigger" things. 

 Saoirse Ronan--in the title role--is the female Jesse Eisenberg. Forever young. I loved her in Brooklyn, where she assumed a more mature persona, and that was three years ago. Now, at twenty three, she's a high school kid and is so totally believable you'd think that yes, she is seventeen, if you didn't know better. She's already scored a win at the Golden Globes for this performance, and we can safely assume an Oscar nomination will follow. 

Laurie Metcalf, as the mom, deserves kudos as well. She's so goddamned irredeemable in her relentless criticism of her daughter--she's the character you love to hate. (You may have trouble deciding if you hate her or Christopher Plummer in All The Money In The World more!) But she's human after all, and that sets up the ending, which of course I won't give away.


Jon Brion's soundtrack is also worth mentioning. It's right on the mark in terms of bringing out the desired emotional effect of every scene. 

If you like a good coming-of-age story as I do (prolly cuz I'm still somewhere in the middle of that transformation), then Lady Bird won't disappoint.

 Grade:  B +  

JILL'S TAKE

Titles can be misleading. Two different friends asked me if Lady Bird was a biopic about Lady Bird Johnson. Far from it! The rebellious teenager in this flick is nothing like our 36^th president's progeny Lynda Bird or Lucy Baines. It's a quirky film and one that reeks of originality. But you'd better be on your toes when you watch it. Those quick cuts and edits can sometime leave the viewer asking "What just happened?"

As a huge fan of Stephen Sondheim, I loved the first musical they put on at the very Catholic high school Lady Bird was attending. God bless Gerwig for letting the cast actually sing a lot of the score from "Merrily We Roll Along." ( It got my Broadway toes a'tapping.) There were moments of hilarity alongside moments of pathos. And every character evoked some kind of reaction. From the Mother Superior whose ability to take a joke was refreshing, to the priest aka drama coach whose past finally caught up with him. (I always assume priests don't have pasts!)

If I were to categorize Lady Bird, I'd call it this year's "sleeper." For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a sleeper becomes successful gradually, often with little promotion. Of course now that it's won two Golden Globes (Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy; and Best Perfomance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy), they will be promoting it like crazy!

It was hard for me to take Lady Bird's constant brattiness and her mom's unending negativity but high marks go to both Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf for their painfully real performances.

Grade: B

MISTRESS AMERICA (2015)

Rated:  R

STARS: Greta Gerwig, Lola Kirke
DIRECTOR: Noah Baumbach
GENRE: Comedy 


Mistress America is reminiscent of a turn of the millennium TV show you may remember--Gilmore Girls--which featured Lauren Graham as a thirty-something mom engaging in rapid-fire repartee with her teen daughter (Alexis Bledel) throughout the show. It was always witty (thanks to the writers) and deadpan humorous. If you liked that show, you will love this movie--the talkiest film I've ever seen (other than My Dinner With Andre and Before Midnight). And yes, it's a total chick flick, but nonetheless I attempt to draw whatever minuscule comprehension of the female brain that I am capable of,  because I owe it to you, dear reader!  

In Mistress America, we have a similar pairing of an 18 year-old college freshman and aspiring writer named Tracy (Lola Kirke), and her thirty-ish future sister-in-law, Brooke (Greta Gerwig). Tracy's mother is marrying Brooke's dad, and so Tracy contacts her future "sis" with the intention of bonding. Brooke takes Tracy into her madcap Times Square world, and Tracy soon develops a strong admiration for this quirky, free-spirited individual, and is writing a story--thinly veiled as fiction but all about Brooke--that will come back to bite her later on.

Brooke's ambitions are bigger than her follow-through. She's got grand schemes, one of which is to start a restaurant, but we can see that she's just a little too scattered to bring something like that off. And she wants to get even with the woman who stole some of her creative ideas, her boyfriend, and her two cats to boot! It will all culminate in a climactic scene that's like something from one of those wacky British stage plays, where everyone is talking a mile a second, and gesticulating wildly, and running in and out the door and up the stairs, and the audience just keeps tittering away. Only the humor here is more deadpan, more urbane, and inventively conceived.

Gerwig, who co-wrote the script with her real life partner, director Noah Baumbach, is at least as good as any (current) SNL actor in pulling off her Zooey Deschanel-esque character. Lola Kirke, a relative newcomer, brings a low-key likability to her role, but I get the feeling she is capable of much more. And then we have Jasmine Cephas Jones as Nicolette, the obsessively jealous girlfriend of  a fellow student Tracy might have some real interest in if he weren't already taken. And though she has a minor role, Jones has been given the best lines in the movie--blunt, jaw-dropping, and not repeatable here!  

At first I wasn't sure what to make of this film. But gradually, it began to win me over. As a small tale about two people in search of themselves, Mistress America has some heart. And it tries really hard. And in an unconventional kind of way, succeeds. 

Grade: B +

JILL'S TAKE

Don't you hate it when friends, people whose opinions you respect and trust, recommend a movie you wind up thinking is a piece of crap? Well, Tim. If Mistress America is "a total chick flick," I want to change my gender!

As happily Hollywood-married as Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach may be, they don't know bupkus about script-writing. Obviously, they've never heard of a "character arc" as no one really changes. (I mean really changes.) Everything is so slick and facile. From the get-go, it's hard to accept that the unpopular-at-school heroine, played somewhat believably by Lola Kirke, is in fact unpopular. She's gorgeous. And unless school values have changed drastically since I was in college, beauty counts. Then there's her new girl crush Brooke, who is so ADHD-ish and self-absorbed that her likablity factor is zero. Some of the scenes felt like they were straight out of SNL. While others, the overly talky ones, were just plain bor-ing. 

Thankfully, I saw this film with someone (clearly not Tim) who had the same brain-numbed reaction I did. And judging from the two other audience members, this film may be a critics' favorite but isn't exactly resonating with the general public. One scene, where all the players are simultaneously reading a script over one another's shoulders is pure slapstick. The rest? Pure schlock.

Grade: D -