Lady Bird, the coming-of-age movie set in Sacramento, CA, has a stubborn disinclination to satisfy normal expectations. Whenever you expect the story to follow a certain path, it goes somewhere else, and whenever you think you know its characters, they always find a way to surprise you. This lack of cliche, along with the movie’s wonderful acting performances, is the main reason you should run, not walk, to your nearest theater to see it while you still have a chance.
After you’ve done so, I would also recommend listening to Bill Simmons’s interview with the director Greta Gerwig and the lead actress Saoirse Ronan to get an immediate sense of their achievement.
Having grown up in northern California, I can vouch for the authenticity of Ronan’s Sacramento accent, and you would never guess that Ronan’s natural speech is the thick Irish brogue that you hear in the interview. She’s not the first actress to master that dramatic a transformation, but it’s still amazing, nonetheless.
There are other ways in which the movie did its homework well. Sacramento is not necessarily the most attractive city to outsiders. Phil Jackson, when he coached the Los Angeles Lakers, famously called it a cow town, but Gerwig, who grew up there, did a good job of finding picturesque locations to add color to the story. She was also thoughtful in her conception of the family that, in the words of the lead character, Lady Bird, lived on the wrong side of the tracks. The mother, played by Laurie Metcalf, was a psychiatric nurse who would likely have made something close to eighty grand per year, but with even small nondescript houses in their east Sacramento neighborhood going for a minimum of a half-million dollars and private school tuition costing over $6,000 per year, it’s not hard to accept the family’s need to rely on thrift stores for their wardrobes. Only in California would they really have been on the wrong side of the tracks, but such is the nature of the Golden State. It’s not just San Francisco or Los Angeles where life can be crazily expensive.
One other item of note. The University of California at Davis, the school for which Lady Bird didn’t want to settle, is ranked twelfth in the nation for public universities in the most recent listings, with many of the higher-ranked schools also in the UC system. Of course, when it comes to picking colleges, ranking and quality of instruction can count for far less in the eyes of eighteen-year-olds than distance. Sometimes, no matter where you live, you just need to get away from home.
