Movies |
Greta Gerwig: The movies before “Barbie” (One is sensational!)
By
Published: Jul 24, 2023
Category:
Drama
I’m very aware that fans spent $337 million on tickets worldwide on its opening weekend, the most ever for the opening weekend of a film this year and the biggest ever for a film written and directed by a woman, and that an astonishing 35% of the opening weekend audience was male and that the usual array of conservatives have bludgeoned the film for its “wokeness.” [To watch the trailer of “Barbie,” click here.]
Given all that, I thought it might be useful to look back at Greta Gerwig’s first two films: “Frances Ha,” which she co-wrote and starred in, and “Lady Bird,” which she wrote and directed. Although the film starts with idiosyncratic charm — Frances is a dancer who thinks she’s much better than she is — it turns sour when, as A.O. Scott notes, “Her specialness seems to be at war with her sense of entitlement. It is painful to watch the world challenging this view even as it’s hard not to be on the side of the world. It’s less of a satire or cautionary tale than it is a bedtime story for young adults.” Ooof! [For the trailer, click here. To rent the stream from Amazon Prime, click here.]
“Lady Bird” is much more ambitious, and much worthier of your attention. Once again a young woman is at odds with her situation and her prospects. But Lady Bird — a name she gave herself — is much more self-aware. She’s a teenager who lives at home, and her parents are credible as individuals, and the dialogue is crisp. This time A.O Scott didn’t hold back:
If you pay the right kind of attention to “Lady Bird” — absorbing its riffs and digressions as well as its melodies, its choral passages along with its solos and duets — you will almost certainly love it. It’s hard not to… she insists on asserting her own individuality, even when she’s not quite sure what that means… What Ms. Gerwig has done — and it’s by no means a small accomplishment — is to infuse one of the most convention-bound, rose-colored genres in American cinema with freshness and surprise. If you pay the right kind of attention to “Lady Bird” — absorbing its riffs and digressions as well as its melodies, its choral passages along with its solos and duets — you will almost certainly love it. It’s hard not to… I wish I could convey to you just how thrilling this movie is. I wish I could quote all of the jokes and recount the best offbeat bits. … even though Lady Bird will never be perfect, “Lady Bird” is. [To watch the preview, click here. To stream the film on Amazon Prime, click here.}
There is a huge difference between writing and directing your own film on a limited budget and taking on a huge studio project as a director-for-hire. The last sentence of the Times review of “Barbie” is almost wistful as it buys back some of the over-the-top praise for this movie: “Gerwig’s talents are one of this movie’s pleasures, and I expect that they’ll be wholly on display in her next one — I just hope that this time it will be a house of her own wildest dreams.”
To watch “Lady Bird” is to get a close-up of a director who’s very capable of standing up for herself.
