Lady Bird (2017)
There's a structural trick at the heart of Lady Bird that I couldn't stop thinking about after the credits rolled, and once you clock it, the whole film snaps into a kind of elegant, almost geometric focus. Everything comes in pairs. Two names for the protagonist, Christine and Lady Bird. Two parents, two boyfriends, two best friends, two school plays, two parties, two possible futures pulling her in opposite directions. Greta Gerwig has built a coming-of-age story around the idea of being caught precisely in the middle, and it's a genuinely brilliant piece of construction, the kind that feels invisible while you're watching but completely deliberate once you step back.
Saoirse Ronan is extraordinary here. I don't think that's a controversial claim at this point, but it's worth saying plainly: this is a star-making performance in the truest sense. She holds every contradictory impulse of late adolescence in her face at once, the desperate ambition, the self-consciousness, the love she can't quite articulate and the cruelty she deploys instead. You're with her even when she's being awful, which, in a film like this, is the whole ballgame.
The family dynamics are where the film really sings, though. Lady Bird's relationship with her mum Marion, played with absolute brilliance by Laurie Metcalf, is the engine driving everything. It's combative and tender and exhausting and recognisable all at once, a mother-daughter war conducted in sharp exchanges and loaded silences. What makes it so compelling is the layer underneath: Marion is clearly carrying her own unresolved history with her mother, cycling the same wounds down a generation without even realising it. That's not spelt out in dialogue. It's just there, in the way Metcalf holds herself, in the things Marion can't bring herself to say. Genuinely some of the finest screen acting in recent memory.
In contrast, Lady Bird's relationship with her dad Larry, played by Tracy Letts, is warmer and quieter, tinged with a sadness he keeps carefully out of sight. He's dealing with unemployment and his own private struggles, and Letts brings an enormous amount of dignity to a role that could easily have been sidelined. He's never sidelined. You feel his weight in every scene.
I also want to put proper credit on Beanie Feldstein, who plays Lady Bird's best friend with the same kind of sweet, socially awkward warmth she brought to Booksmart. She brings genuine heart to the screen in both films, and it's a real talent, making you root for someone through sheer likability without ever tipping into saccharine. She's brilliant here.
But it's the finale that cements this as a modern classic for me. I won't get into specifics, but the closing stretch delivers a sudden, quiet realisation that Lady Bird is already travelling the same roads as her mum, that the escape she's been straining towards doesn't quite mean what she thought it did. It's not a twist, it's more of an arrival, and it lands with a lump in the throat that the rest of the film has been carefully, patiently earning. The whole picture recontextualises itself in those final minutes. That's a rare thing.
There's a version of this story that tips into sentimentality or easy resolution, and Lady Bird never goes near either. It earns its emotion by being honest about how messy and contradictory these years actually are, how you can love someone and resent them ferociously at the same time, how growing up is mostly just making mistakes and gradually, painfully, beginning to understand the people who raised you.
Four stars. Brilliant stuff.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2026-06-29
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: MUBI · MUBI Amazon Channel
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Hulu · HBO Max Amazon Channel · Cinemax Amazon Channel · HBO Max
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Physical: Amazon US
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