I don’t know about you guys but I love coming of age movies. They transport me to simpler times, when a bad day was when I called the teacher "mom" or something like that. For many, high school was the best time of their lives, for others they just wanted to get it over with. But for all of us, high school, and senior year in particular is a time of great changes.
Christine, or Lady Bird as she named herself is your typical high school student, she doesn’t have straight A’s, isn’t in any group, hell, she isn’t even part of the cool group. But she has one thing that sets her apart, she hates her hometown of Sacramento, California. In the first scene we see her in a car with her mom, talking about how she hates Sacramento, and her desire to go to college on the east coast. Her mother quickly answered that she could never get into an east coast college and that she should settle for community college in town. While her mother tries to give her a little dose of reality, Lady Bird opens her car door and jumps out of the moving car all while her mother watches in horror.
For the rest of the movie we see Lady Bird do all that’s in her power to get into the college of her dreams. She joins a drama club (but doesn’t get the lead role), where she meets Danny who she dates for a while until she discovers him with another guy, yikes. She gets a job at a coffee shop (curiously it’s not starbucks) and quickly falls for the bassist of a band called "L’enfance Nue". It sounds pretentious as hell and he definitely is too, but at 17 we all ate that shit up. I mean, his name is Kyle, and he’s played by Hollywood’s newest heartthrob Timothee Chalamet, what more can we expect? But between all the mundane teen drama, we find out her parents are struggling financially, and all Lady Bird can think about is how she can leave. And we could easily say she’s selfish for her actions (because she was), but it’s easy to forget how just a few years ago we were in her shoes. How urgent it felt to leave our hometowns, get as far away from our boring lives. At 17, we feel like our family doesn’t get us, we argue constantly but when we find the perfect prom dress we scream for joy together. Everything just seems so important and life-or-death to you, that you forget that everyone else exists.
In the end, Lady Bird gets her wish and is on her way to the airport but her mother isn’t talking to her. She gets off the car with her father but her mom stays; neither is willing to swallow their pride and talk, so Lady Bird leaves. All the while we see her dad storing some letters her mom tried to write to her in her bag. We next see Lady Bird in a college party, going as Christine now, and she brought a guy to her dorm despite having nothing in common. He rifles through her CD collection and remarks: ‘’Jesus Christ, you have bad music. It’s all greatest hits.’’ to which she answers: ‘’But they’re the greatest. What’s wrong with that?’’. They start making out as one does when there’s nothing else to do but she throws up and is taken to the hospital for alcohol poisoning. It's Sunday when she leaves, we hear church bells and they seem to entice Christine to enter the church but she leaves quickly after that. Outside the church Christine leaves a phone message to her mom, one that we’ve all at one point have made to our parents one way or another: to thank them for everything, their sacrifice, love, and the place they brought us up. I think this perfectly encapsulates the movie for me. It has all the greatest hits of a coming of age movie, but it’s done so well that you just can’t help but to hum along and reminisce of your own mixtape.
Written by Confused_coquí
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