BEFORE: Up early on a Monday morning, which is very unusual for me - but I had to get in to Manhattan before the lines built up at the cable company (hint: almost rhymes with "rectum") service center. This was a smart move, because the place probably is crowded right before 9 and then again at lunchtime, so I arrived just before 11, and the line moved really fast. I was number 7 on the call board, and 3 minutes later I was speaking to a counter rep. I handed in my old DVR and asked them if they would end its life in a humane manner. I think I may have inquired about whether they were going to have some formal ceremony, or just take it out behind the barn and shoot it. At least I made one guy laugh during a stressful situation.
Thanks to my time spent yelling at cable reps over the phone about my movie channels not working, I knew to ask this guy for a slightly older DVR model, one that might give me a chance of keeping up my outdated practice of dubbing movies to DVD to make them more inconvenient to watch. But since I know that not every movie that's streaming will be streaming forever, I need to maintain this habit in order to make sure that every film will continue to be available when I'm ready to watch it. Thankfully they didn't call me a heretic for my arcane movie-viewing rituals and burn me at the stake. Next step will be to get this DVR home and plug it into my system, and program it to re-record the movies that I didn't get a chance to dub off the old DVR before it died. I've got to get this all straightened out before I start missing movies, and before I go up to Massachusetts this weekend to see my parents.
Lucas Hedges carries over from "Kill the Messenger".
THE PLOT: In 2002, an artistically inclined seventeen-year-old girl comes of age in Sacramento, California.
AFTER: This film got a lot of attention before the last Oscars, and then once it didn't win any of those awards, it seems like everyone stopped talking about it. I still have access to Academy screeners that I haven't watched yet, so perhaps people will talk about this film again once it's on cable. I guess it was a big deal at the time to have a female director nominated, but since she didn't win the fervor over this film seems to have cooled down a great deal.
The linking obviously encouraged me to place this film here, but I was unsure about doing so, because it seemed to be largely about a girl's final year of high school, and I don't usually start my education-themed movies until late August or early September. But June is also a time to discuss high school and college graduations, so I can justify watching this one here in June also. Plus it's about halfway between Mother's Day and Father's Day right now, and a film about a daughter's very different relationships with her two parents also seems quite timely.
Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and therefore mothers and fathers work very differently. The older stereotype would dictate that the father would be the disciplinarian, the tougher of the two parents, while the mother would therefore tend to be more nurturing and forgiving. Ah, but we live in different times, and that's reflected in our cinema - if anything, Hollywood has turned this stereotype around, and in a number of films that I've seen recently, the mother is the authority figure and the father can be portrayed as more reasonable, if also distant at times. (I'm going to ignore "The House" for the moment, where neither parent acted responsibly or had their shit together.)
Thinking back to "The Squid and the Whale" in March - where the mother was a critic (in every sense of the word) and the rule-maker, and the father was a novelist, and the easygoing rule-breaker. The kids were caught in the middle, only partially aware that the gender norms were being flipped. Then I watched "Music of the Heart", where Meryl Streep was a single mother who had to use music to instill discipline into her two sons - here their father wasn't even in the picture! Then in April there was "Dolores Claiborne", where a mother had to go to extreme lengths to protect her daughter, and getting Dad out of there was a necessary part of that equation. That brings me to "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri", with another divorced mother acting as the authority figure, even to the point of demanding justice for her daughter after death.
For Mother's Day I hit the trifecta - with "I, Tonya", "Two Weeks" and "One True Thing". Again, strong mothers and absent (or ineffectual) fathers. Definitely a trend for this year. I'm trying to pivot more toward fathers than mothers now, but the films don't want to seem to cooperate yet. "One True Thing" had another father who was a busy professor/novelist (also seen in "Winter Passing") and this means that such a character can't possibly be there emotionally for his kids. Come on, a woman can hold down a job and run a household, be a breadwinner, provider and a caregiver but we just don't expect the same thing from men in our society.
(ASIDE: You could say that the mothers in "Two Weeks" and "One True Thing" pulled the same passive-aggressive move - they came down with terminal illnesses. If you think about it, it's the ultimate passive-aggressive statement, suddenly everyone in the family is expected to drop what they're doing and take care of their mother. I agree it's a long way to go to make a point, but how else am I supposed to interpret that? Whereas the mother in "I, Tonya" wasn't so much passive-aggressive, she was definitely more aggressive-aggressive...)
In "Lady Bird", I see a lot of these same elements repeated yet again. Lady Bird's father is under-employed, then un-employed, and this leads to depression. What kind of a man can't provide for his family? And her mother works in some kind of psych ward, though I'm not sure if she's a doctor, nurse or what, it's not made very clear. But she's clearly bringing home the bacon with this job, so why aren't they living in a better situation, are nurses not paid very well in Sacramento? Why does Lady Bird joke about living on the "wrong side of the tracks"? I would suggest that the main reason for the family's financial problems is the high cost of that Catholic school education (what a rip-off, public school is, like, free, right?).
The mother figure here is incredibly passive-aggressive, but in her own unique way. They temper this by stating that her own mother was alcoholic and abusive, as if this justifies the fact that everything she says that is intended to sound helpful or complimentary has an under-current to it, one that is both hurtful and ego-crushing at the same time. My mother did a lot of this, she's still unable to give me any advice that doesn't also put me in my place at the same time, or point out my shortcomings. It's some form of defense mechanism, I reckon, an inability to conceive that her child is somehow different than her, or can possibly get through life without her advice. It's a bit like a verbal form of Munchausen by proxy syndrome, where a mother has to keep her child sick so that she can keep acting as the healer. Verbally putting her daughter down keeps the daughter in a place where she constantly needs the mother's help or advice, or so the theory goes. But what it does instead is create a situation where the child eventually feels the need to leave home for a healthier environment, even if that leads to making terrible mistakes or bad life choices on her (or his) own. (This is my read on the situation based on my own experience, but as always, your mileage may vary.)
I see the whole religion thing this way also - we all sort of get born into our parents' religion, we become what they were and we believe in God (or not) because they did (or didn't). Eventually when we're 18 or 20 we get a chance to be something else if we want, and believe in something else (or nothing) if we want. This is a positive thing. We've got to be comfortable about the way we're going to spend the rest of our lives, and being financially and morally independent from our parents is a big part of that. At the same time we set out on a career path, it's a good time to think about what we want to believe in for the foreseeable future. I decided to stop going to church around the same time I left for college, and for me that was a big step in the right direction. I got my Sundays back, and I didn't have to listen to a bunch of people tell me how the universe worked when I didn't believe they even knew what they were talking about.
The whole reason she calls herself "Lady Bird" - it's another sign she wants to break from her parents. I think this is more common than we realize, when people realize that their self-identity is based on a name their parents came up with, and that they had no say in the matter, it's another milestone on the journey if someone changes their name. Another sign that someone is starting to think for themselves, take control of their own destiny instead of just following the rough guidelines that their parents have suggested for them.
I can't really find a connection between my experiences and those of a 17-year-old girl in Catholic school, except that I was also raised in that cult-like religion, I also was involved in theater productions in high school, and my mother also nearly messed up my driving test. She got into my head by telling me a story about her driving test, and she was asked to do a three-point turn on a hill, and for some reason back then she was supposed to use her other foot to hold down the brake when switching gears. When my tester asked me to do a similar turn, I moved my left foot over to the brake, and he said what I was doing was very illegal. I guess back in my mother's day things were different, like you had to use the choke or the clutch or pedal the car with your bare feet like Fred Flintstone. Anyway, I think it was her subtle way of trying to make me fail the test, so her little boy wouldn't die in a car crash or take one more step toward being an adult.
And I also did what Lady Bird did, which was to apply for colleges in NYC so I stood a chance of getting out of suburbia and maybe not becoming just like my parents. And that meant a whole slew of new experiences at NYU, finally getting to kiss a girl and learning how much drinking was too much for one night. The only way to do it is to go through it at that point.
That being said, the way this film jumps through Lady Bird's senior year feels very disjointed, it's basically a random collection of experiences that she had, and they didn't seem to add up to a coherent whole, not for me, anyway. Maybe they're not supposed to, but we live our lives in a linear fashion (most of us, anyway) and I'm more comfortable with movies that do the same. I'm glad that this film didn't jump backwards and forward in time, like so many movies do these days, at least it kept moving only forward, but I still would have like to see more connection between the different scenes, because I think that would have made the story stronger. I like WHERE it's going, I'm just not sold on how it gets there.
EDIT: I just realized I watched TWO films within one week's time with teen girls in Catholic high schools - the other one was "Superstar". But they are two very different movies.
Also starring Saoirse Ronan (last seen in "Atonement"), Laurie Metcalf (last seen in "Frankie and Johnny"), Tracy Letts (last seen in "The Post"), Timothee Chalamet (last seen in "Interstellar"), Beanie Feldstein (last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Lois Smith (last seen in "The Comedian"), Stephen McKinley Henderson (last seen in "Manchester by the Sea"), Odeya Rush, Jordan Rodrigues, Marielle Scott, John Karna, Jake McDorman (last seen in "American Sniper"), Bayne Gibby, Laura Marano, Marietta DePrima, Daniel Zovatto, Kristen Cloke, Andy Buckley (last seen in "The House"), Kathryn Newton, Myra Turley, Bob Stephenson (last heard in "Nerdland").
RATING: 5 out of 10 hot rollers
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