Review: Lady Bird

Lets get this out of the way: As the awards season gathers pace, Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut Lady Bird is in severe danger of being overhyped. Be warned, it’s the kind of modest, indie coming-of-age story we’ve seen a million times. Set in a vaguely nostalgic 2002 and 2003, it’s episodic and stylistically simple, with a guitar-heavy soundtrack. It hits the familiar beats: Prom Night, painful conflicts with parents and falling outs with best friends; the pursuit of popularity, the loss of virginity and the wisdom that comes when grand dreams crunch up against reality. But Lady Bird is written, directed and performed with such tenderness, spiky humour and attention to detail, that it’s a delight to behold.

Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) is a dramatic and somewhat pretentious 17-year-old who insists on being called by the name ‘Lady Bird’. Her kind-hearted father, Larry (Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and actor Tracy Letts), is a computer programmer struggling with depression and unemployment. Her overworked mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf), puts in double shifts as a nurse to support the family and send Christine to a Catholic school, where she’s a merely mediocre student. It’s no wonder that Marion rolls her eyes in exasperation whenever Christine talks about her dreams of attending an expensive East Coast college, far away from the dull but pretty suburbs where they live. (“Sacramento is like the mid-west of California,” Christine whines, just like another discontented Sacramento character this year, Ben Stiller’s Brad in Brad’s Status.) And yet Lady Birdplays like an inadvertent love letter to the humble charms of that very particular place in America.

Read the full review here at SBS Movies.

Atonement

Like it or not, certain kinds of films get a free pass when it comes to class and Atonement ticks all the right boxes. First, it's based on a novel by Ian McEwan (Endless Love) so it's got literary cred on its side, not to mention a story that's actually about something more than glamorous people talking loud and saying nothing. Second, it's (in part) a love story set against the backdrop of the Second World War - think a less morally dubious version of the extremely classy The English Patient. And third, the characters are all either English gentry or their grimy yet studly servants, and decades of ABC miniseries have trained us to see snooty types in dinner jackets in the 1930's as class all the way. Usually all this class would be hiding a whole lot of not much at its core (again, think The English Patient), but thankfully all this effort hasn't been wasted on a featherweight story.

It's the 1930s, and Briony(Saoirse Ronan) is a precocious child busy writing plays and stories in her family's huge mansion in the English countryside while her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightly) is slowly circling Robbie (JamesMcAvoy), the made good son of a former servant. Briony thinks she's worldly and wise, but when she jumps to conclusions about her sister's relationship -and then uses those conclusions to tear their lives apart - she soon realises that she's nothing more than a painful meddler. Her efforts to right her wrong make up the second half of the film, and while they initially seem to be setting this film up to be little more than a very well crafted and highly entertaining tale of love lost and (perhaps) found again, it's the revelations towards the end regarding exactly how far Briony is willing to go to engineer a "happily everafter" that lift this from a engaging but lightweight romance to something really special. You might even call it classy.

Anthony Morris