I am most likely going to gush. You have been warned.
I’m one of those people who makes a list every year, denoting the films of prestige coming out soon so that, once awards season begins, I can make my move, form fully fledged opinions, and say, “Hey, I think I have an idea of what the best movies are this year.” It’s not often that one of them makes a lasting impression on me on a molecular level, where something resonates so deeply into my bones that I almost don’t know how to carry its story around with me because it feels, often, too similar to my own. Sometimes, I attribute my fascination with some films to my desire to be the person who wrote the script, and other times, I know it’s my incessant need to find an identifier in everything I’ve seen.
In 2018, I was queen of the bootleg. My roommates would head off to bed, and the hours between midnight and 2am were my favorite. I’d find a bootleg of a film–usually one with Oscar buzz or at least a positive set of reviews–and set myself up for an early morning viewing. We had a couple snow days that year, too, and on one, in the middle of the cold afternoon, I found a link for Lady Bird, an A24 movie on track for a nomination in the Best Picture category. Not to mention its likely appearance in Best Director for Greta Gerwig in the second film of three she’s directed. It seemed unassuming, an actress with pink hair who I remembered from Atonement, about an hour and a half long.
I was sold within 2 minutes. I should have known the moment Saoirse Ronan’s Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson opened the door of her mother’s moving car and rolled out in order to end a fight with her mother that something about this movie was going to mean the world to me.
There are quite possibly no two people in this world who love each other harder and frustrate each other more than me and my mother. Laurie Metcalf brings every moment of that mother’s intense love and true exasperation from Gerwig’s screenplay to life. She’s alive with it all.
When I learned that Gerwig’s screenplay was meant to be a semi-autobiographical one, something sort of clicked for me. Of course it was. Lady Bird feels so lived in–the character, I mean–and here, it does not come only from a fabulous lead performance. The desperation for something more than the places, things, and people you already know, to be something more than you’ve already become, to make sure that every moment of yours feels important all feels like that of a girl who lived through it all. She feels, in every moment, like a real person, even the silly ones like telling her dad about how Alanis Morrissette wrote “You Oughta Know,” auditioning for the school musical with a song from Thoroughly Modern Millie, sneaking out of class to snack on communion wafers with Beanie Feldstein’s Julie (a supporting performance that flew under the radar undeservedly. If anyone brings Ronan back to the ground in this film, it’s Feldstein.)
There’s a scene, one of the film’s most famous occurring somewhere in the middle, that moved me to tears for the final forty five minutes of the film upon my first watch. Lady Bird shops for a prom dress with her mother, and as she tries them on, she looks her mother in the eye with a courage I wish I’ve felt at any point in my life and asks her mother the eternal question we ask of our moms: “But do you like me?”
Laurie Metcalf is perfect in this moment, as she’s perfect in every scene, perfect in a part no one else could have played: “I want you to be the very best version of yourself.”
Lady Bird exhibits a vulnerability I lived in for years, one I’m sure I’ll live in forever, with a question I think I ask myself in the mirror every morning: “But what if this is the best version?”
I cried for the final forty five minutes, which I will not spoil for you, dear readers, here. Greta Gerwig does these things with colors and sounds and visuals and direction that make me wish I was that good at anything and remind me that it all just takes work… even for people who may have made the perfect movie in their second goddamn go-around. It is, annoyingly, the film I recommend to truly everyone I have ever met.
When the promotional stills for Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women hit the internet, I just about hit the floor. If anyone could make a book that 8th grade Kate hated into a fabulous movie, it would be Gerwig.
The cast list was everyone who’s anyone (of white people, which is the general gripe anyone has with Gerwig’s work, and it makes a lot of sense:) Saoirse Ronan, who seems to be the muse, as Jo, Laura Dern in what ended up being her ~year as Marmie, Timothee Chalamet in the role of king douchebag Laurie, Eliza Scanlen fresh from a turn as the sickly little sister in HBO’s Sharp Objects (and seriously, I will think about those final 30 seconds for the rest of my life) as Beth. Florence Pugh, breaking out in a massive way in a criminally underrated performance in Midsommar, took on Amy, the March sister everyone really hates even when there’s Meg, the world’s most boring novel character, portrayed by Emma Watson. I mean, seriously, if you were going to make a movie just for me, it would probably be this one.
Gerwig delivered, and not enough people saw it, so, if this gushing love letter to Greta Gerwig does anything, maybe it will convince you to take it in if you haven’t seen it. There was already a perfect Little Women adaptation in the ether before this (happy “last issue of Loco” to me, I snuck two Sutton Foster references into this piece.) Surely, nobody had to make a new one, and yet, out came this fabulous thing.
(This is a 150 year old book. Surely, I cannot spoil any of this story for you.)
The most jarring aspects of Little Women are the ones some, according to Twitter or some other hellscape, found confusing. Unlike the novel and each of the previous film adaptations, Gerwig’s 2019 version isn’t told in a linear sequence. The changes in color direction make this rather clear, and it’s a choice that sets this adaptation apart on its own, so much so that I can even forgive an egregious lapse in editing and set design. Meg, as the eldest sister, is the first off to marry, excited to do so as her biggest ambition, it seems, is to be a wife and a mother. Ronan’s Jo is properly devastated, and in some of her best moments, she expresses not only her deep loneliness of which she rarely speaks but also her fear of losing her sisters, even without so many words.
Beth, the beautiful little piano player who unsuspectingly drove me and my poor mother to tears in the movie theater, falls ill sometime after the wedding, but in the sequencing of the film, these events are practically smashed together. Jo’s losing her sisters in clearly two of the hardest moments of her life, whether one is meant to be a beautiful day and the other a painful loss or not. It drives it all right home, and, once again, it sent my stupid crybaby ass into a fit in that theater.
In my defense, I rushed through the book in 8th grade (had a report due, hadn’t finished reading the book,) so there were certainly things I missed, moments that made my mom smack me on the arm when I gasped in the theater… or when I’d cry again. Jo losing all motivation to write upon losing her sister speaks to me on another level. I’ve been more open recently in how I handle grief in that one of my methods of handling is really just not dealing with it at all. Grief is so hard. It hangs in the air in the final hour of the film.
There are enough thinkpieces concerning the (mostly deserved?) redemption of Amy March in Gerwig’s adaptation. It’s hard not to love Florence Pugh, who brings a breath of fresh air even to the scenes in which a young Amy (whose bangs only exist to let us know that she’s a little girl. I love flashback bangs) is meant to be her most bratty and annoying.
When Amy burns Jo’s book, every flash of being a demonic sister played in my mind. I understood her in a way I never had before. Of course, famously, readers of the novel and lovers of the previous adaptations scorn Amy for her choice to marry Chalamet’s Laurie after he’d already proposed to Jo. How was Laurie never the villain in that triangle? I’ve never understood. Maybe don’t propose to the little sister of the woman to whom you just proposed. Maybe that’s bad. Somehow, the combination of Gerwig’s script and Pugh’s fabulous Academy Award nominated performance makes the choice redeemable. It almost makes it defensible.
This really may have just been a gush session. In fact, Greta Gerwig lived the life that I wanted to live years ago, down to the “being a filmmaker with a degree from Barnard College” of it all. She made two near perfect movies that I adore so fully, minus one casting decision (I’m looking at you, Bob Odenkirk.) We should, from here on out, let Greta Gerwig make everything. I can picture the colors and the music and the Saoirse Ronan of it all. I know I wouldn’t mind.
