LADY BIRD (2017)
Friday, December 8, 2017 -
The high school coming-of-age comedy, when pitched somewhere between slapstick and sincere, may just be the perfect cinematic genre.
For therein lies the somewhat shameful but persistently heart-fluttering promise that any cinephile feels when the lights go down and the movie screen brightens: an exuberant, greedy, uncynical yearning for self-discovery. Limitless possibilities that run roughshod across the boundaries of a naïve, limited understanding of the world.
Rushmore. Dazed & Confused. Ghost World.
Youth is the subject of these movies, and, lucky enough for even the most jaded of film fans, youth is not just about being young.
Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird opens with a quotation from Joan Didion, that great neurotic chronicler of the sad, weird banality of California:
“Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.”