Lady Bird

Grade: B +

Director: Greta Gerwig

Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Laura Marano, Tracy Letts, Lucas Hedges, Timothée Chalamet, Beanie Feldstein, Jordan Rodrigues, and Lois Smith

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 33 min.

Writer Greta Gerwig claims Lady Bird, her directorial debut, isn’t autobiographical. Yet like Gerwig, the film’s protagonist, Christine ‘Lady Bird’ McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), grows up in Sacramento and as a high school senior attends a private Catholic girls academy circa 2002 (when Gerwig would have been 19 years old). Both of their moms are nurses, and both dads were unemployed computer programmers. And both yearn(ed) to break out of Sactown and bask in the bright lights of New York City. That said, Gerwig says she never failed her driver’s license test nor asked anyone to call her by a nickname. So … all square?

Gerwig was also a self-professed “intense child,” an apt description of Christine, who insists on being called ‘Lady Bird’ for reasons that aren’t really ever explained. Lady Bird is a precocious teenager who exudes a cavalier attitude about school, family, and friends while harboring a fervent desire to be accepted by all. Her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf) rules the roost with iron-fisted pragmatism and greets Lady Bird’s eccentricities with passive aggressiveness disdain. Her dad Larry (the great Tracy Letts), unemployed and depressed, wants to help Lady Bird realize her NYC dreams but fears Marion’s reprisal. At school, Lady Bird can make good grades when she wants to. Socially, she’s hangs with her unassuming best friend Julie (Beanie Feldstein) and embraces the school theater troupe, yet she still wants to be accepted by the cool crowd.

Ronan is awards-worthy great, but the true complexity of Lady Bird is exhibited in how it even-handedly treats its antagonists. Marion comes across as rigid and even uncaring, yet running a family of five solely on a nurse’s salary is daunting enough even without Lady Bird’s trying peculiarities. Jenna (Odeya Rush), the school’s resident popular tart whom Lady Bird tries to befriend, is less a mean girl than simply privileged and aloof. The same goes for Kyle (Timothée Chalamet), the object of Lady Bird’s infatuation, who isn’t some muscle-bound jock, but instead a brooding anarchist whose liberal, literate leanings mask rank self-involvement. All the while, Lady Bird tries to balance her wannabe rebellious against Catholic guilt, espoused by a surprisingly empathetic headmistress (Lois Smith).

Lady Bird is an astute, refreshing coming-of-age dramedy, but it’s more than that. As the film’s denouement confirms, it’s a paean to home and how we are a product of our formative setting, both time and place. Lady Bird dismisses Sacramento, taking the familiar environs for granted, until she moves away and realizes they are inextricably linked. Although we may leave our hometown, our hometown ever quite leaves us.

Mistress America

I am Jill's Meet Cute

Grade: D

Director: Noah Baumbach

Starring: Lola Kirke, Greta Gerwig, Heather Lind, Matthew Shear, Jasmine Cephas Jones and Michael Chernus

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 24 min.

There’s a path Mistress America could have taken early that might have salvaged this pretentious farce. Tracy Fishko (Lola Kirke) is a college freshman suffocating inside the social circles of Barnard College in New York City. After being rebuffed by a would-be boyfriend, Tony (Matthew Shear), and the snooty campus literary society, Tracy rings Brooke (Greta Gerwig), her 30-year-old stepsister-in-waiting. Tracy’s mom is about to marry Brooke’s dad, and the effervescent (and lonely) Brooke is happy to introduce the doting Tracy to the verve of Brooke’s cosmopolitan lifestyle.

Tracy’s lit life, as dour as her ever-present pullover sweater, throws the autodidact Brooke’s dinner parties, bar crooning and grand plans to open a restaurant/hair salon into such sharp relief that you wonder if you’re observing a Fight Club-style conceit, with Brooke embodying Tracy’s illusory id.

”I am Jill's Spinning Classes.”

Alas, Brooke proves all too actual as Mistress America aims to lambast millennial angst through the construct of a screwball comedy. The script soon settles into Tracy and Brooke’s insufferable byplay (eventually spreading to the rest of the cast), yammered without the use of pesky punctuation. The rapid-fire repartee in screwball comedies of the 1930s and 40s was largely the consequence of writers and performers still geared towards the vaudevillian stage. This screenplay by Gerwig and director Noah Baumbach is pure pastiche, written with a tin ear for the way sentient beings actually community with each other.

Brooke speaks of starting a cabaret called “High Standards,” in which she’ll perform songs about lofty moral aspirations and ambitions. Discussing an ex-boyfriend who was a geologist, she observes how “it’s weird that someone so into rocks can be into Jesus.” On and on it goes as the bon mots land like bunker busters, and when Brooke makes intentionally awkward references to sending “a tweet on Twitter” and “a gram on Instagram,” it make Baumbach sound like an old man yelling at clouds.

“I am Jill's faux Woody Allen.”

Tracy soon realizes that Brooke’s flighty countenance masks an arrogance and insecurity feeding her arrested adulthood. Brooke incessantly discusses a frenemy named Mamie-Claire (Heather Lind)—yes, everyone calls her that—who once stole her boyfriend Dylan (Michael Chernus), her cats and her idea for “really hard-looking” flower print T-shirts. The film shifts its third act to Dylan and Mamie-Claire’s mod Greenwich, Connecticut home so Brooke can beg for restaurant startup funds. The result is a parlor scene in which the inane dialogue amps up. A panoply of inconsequential supporting characters join in, including Mamie-Claire’s pregnant attorney friend, a nosey neighbor and Tony’s outlandishly paranoid girlfriend (Jasmine Cephas Jones), who believes he wants to “sext” every girl he meets.

Everyone soons discovers that Tracy has turned Brooke’s flighty, unfulfilled life into a short story designed to finally get Tracy admitted into that lit society. “You don’t read fiction,” Mamie-Claire reminds Dylan. “I do when it’s about my friends,” he responds. *rimshot*

“I am Jill's Warby Parker Spectacles.”

It all goes nowhere except a cloying climax not befitting the film’s supposedly edgy façade. Beyond the annoying script and unlikeable characters, the gnawing problem with Mistress America is that while Baumbach and Gerwig make passing attempts at skewering millennials, it feels like a New York milieu with which they are both intimately familiar and fond. It’s self-effacement bordering on self-referential, resulting in a work so farcical that it’s insulated from offending anyone, except the audience.

Where’s Tyler Durden when you need him?

“I am Jill's Smug, Strained Social Satire.”