Before Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (Saoirse Ronan)—Lady Bird is her given name, as in “[she] gave it to [her]self”—auditions for the school musical, she watches a young man belting the final notes to “Being Alive” from Stephen Sondheim’s Company. A few moments before, while in a car with her mother, she lays her head on the window wistfully and says with a sigh, “I wish I could just live through something.” Stuck in Sacramento, where she thinks there’s there’s nothing to be offered her yet she pays acute attention to everything her home does have to offer, Lady Bird—and the film, written and directed by Greta Gerwig, that shares her name—has ambivalence running through her veins.
What a perfect match: Stephen Sondheim and Greta Gerwig. Michael Schulman wrote in The New Yorker, “No one in musical theatre does ambivalence like Sondheim, and usually no one tells you what it is until after you’ve experienced it.” Few filmmakers are able to capture the same kind of ambiguity and mixed feelings that involve the refusal to make up one’s mind: look to 35-year-old Bobby impulsively wanting to marry a friend, but keeps him from committing to any of his girlfriends, in Company; the “hemming and hawing” of Cinderella on the, ahem, steps of the palace; or Mrs. Lovett’s cause for pause in telling Sweeney her real motives. Lady Bird isn’t as high-concept as many of Sondheim’s works, but there’s a piercing truthfulness to the film, and arguably Gerwig’s work in general, that makes its anxieties and tenderness reverberate in the viewer’s heart with equal frequency.
Lady Bird, in spite of her glorious assertiveness, is ambivalent about everything: She doesn’t really like her given name, doesn’t really like her hometown but can’t stop appreciating its beauty, she’s not sure about her faith (she attends a Catholic high school), she’s dissatisfied with her (class) status amongst her friends and in life, even though she, as her “scary, but warm-hearted mother” Marion (Laurie Metcalf) would be quick to tell you, doesn’t necessarily have the work ethic to change things. Gerwig, and Ronan by turn, have an uncanny ability to present the bizarre, but quite common, state of mind that occupies the point of both contented satisfaction and complete dissatisfaction. Ronan is perfectly paradoxical in how self-assured she can be when approaching a boy or how disappointed she feels after she sleeps with someone for the first time. She, like all of us if not more intensely, feels things are going to be better on the other side of the proverbial fence. Always.
It’s not insignificant, then, that the first boy we see her date, a tall, gangly Danny (Lucas Hedges), sings “Giants in the Sky” from Into the Woods for his audition, a song in which a young Jack (of the beanstalk sort) ruminates on the bittersweet nature of change and emotional maturity, the inability to have it both ways. Particularly of interest is Jack’s consideration of the home he never cared for in the first place: “The roof, the house and your mother at the door / The roof, the house and the world you never thought to explore.” It’s a hard song to sing, one that has notes that fly beyond the clouds and stoop as low as the roots of said stalk. Hedges does a lovely job, but the song’s preoccupations with “wish[ing] that you could live in between” may speak to Lady Bird as much as Danny’s loveliness. Lady Bird wishes so much to get out, to be in New York (“where there’s culture”) or at least Connecticut. But the way she knows the geography of her world—of her house and even of her body, Ronan casually sitting upside down watching TV or sprawled across the couch—suggests there’s as much affection as there is disdain for that world from which she so wants to get away.