“Greta Gerwig didn’t get much sleep leading up to the Friday premiere of her directorial debut, the coming-of-age dramedy Lady Bird, at the Telluride Film Festival,” writes Josh Rottenberg, introducing his interview with the filmmaker for the Los Angeles Times. “For the actress turned writer-director, previously best known for her work in such films as Frances Ha and 20th Century Women, the thought of screening Lady Bird in front of an audience of die-hard cinephiles and awards-season tastemakers—in the same opening-night slot that launched Moonlight last year, no less—was both thrilling and utterly frightening. . . . As it turned out, Gerwig had nothing to worry about. In its first outing, warmly introduced by Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, Lady Bird soared.”
Gerwig has “thoroughly reinvigorated the senior-year-in-high-school coming-of-age comedy,” writes A. O. Scott in a dispatch from Telluride to the New York Times. “To some degree autobiographical—the heroine, like her creator, lives in Sacramento—the movie is sharp, shrewd, funny and impeccably cast. Saoirse Ronan is Christine McPherson, who prefers to be called Lady Bird and who grapples with some of the usual frustrations of adolescence: sex, school, friendship, parents (Tracy Letts and Laurie Metcalf, both superb). The story, set in the 2002-03 school year, unfolds episodically, through homecoming, college applications and senior prom, and a few John Hughesy notes are struck, but the overwhelming impression is of an original creative voice in the process of self-discovery: Christine’s, and also Ms. Gerwig’s.”
“What Gerwig does best is acutely capture the heady blur of the last year of high school, when old things gradually matter less and less as new opportunity and excitement tantalizingly tease on the horizon,” writes Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson. “Hopefully the experience of making the film provided the personal catharsis and clarity it’s so ardently in search of. For the outside audience, the film at least does all this rummaging through personal history with a sterling cast—Timothée Chalamet, Odeya Rush, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and an utterly winning Beanie Feldstein are among the standouts—all flourishing in the easygoing glow of Gerwig’s warm, confident filmmaking.”
“Movie fans that aren’t at Telluride are at a fever pitch over the reports of incredible performances from Annette Bening (Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool) and Sally Hawkins (The Shape of Water),” notes Gregory Ellwood at the Playlist. “You better add Metcalf to the list of must-sees this fall. She gives a heartfelt turn that is, frankly, the soul of the film.”
“Metcalf has never had a big-screen role as rich as this,” adds Variety’s Peter Debruge, “and she makes the most of it, playing a character who doesn’t hold back in criticizing her daughter’s faults (from academics to future job prospects), but works double shifts in the psych ward to provide for her future. On the surface, she’s tough on Lady Bird, but Metcalf manages to communicate between each line how it all comes from a place of caring. The big showdown between them involves Lady Bird’s choice of college, and what will become of the family if she goes off to the east coast. Gerwig may have flown the nest, but Lady Bird is proof that she hasn’t forgotten where she came from.”
“Lady Bird consolidates the style and sensibility of a generation caught between the last gasp of the 20th century and post-9/11 disillusionment like nothing else before,” finds IndieWire’s Eric Kohn. “It looks back on that moment less to relish memories of a bygone era than to commune with its impact on young adults today. For Gerwig, it’s indisputable proof of a shrewd storyteller at the top of her form. The movie may capture a woman in transition, but there’s no question that its director has come of age.”
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