Authenticity is fleeting in American teen comedies, even when they shade over into coming-of-age tales. In her autobiographical directing debut, Greta Gerwig is obviously after authenticity above everything else—it’s mainly there in the subversive dialogue—but she’s too experienced as an actor and indie film fixture not to want to get as many laughs as she can, and the purposely commonplace quality of her setting—early 00s Sacramento, which one person calls the “Midwest of California”—works to emphasize the extraordinary self-possession of the titular character, high school senior Christine (Saoirse Ronan), who prefers to be called Lady Bird. Extraordinary protagonists are, of course, the standard of teen comedies, but mainly in constrast to their peers. Here, what makes Lady Bird special is her relationship with her parents, in particular her mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf), a hard-working nurse who recognizes what’s extraordinary about her daughter but still has to throw her authoritative weight around because she panics at the idea that Lady Bird is unequipped for the world, despite her intelligence and sensitivity. While driving back from a tour of colleges, the pair listen to an audio book of The Grapes of Wrath and get into a bizarre argument about how to appreciate the novel, which has brought them both to tears. In protest to her mother’s haughtiness, Lady Bird flings herself out of the moving car.
It’s a joke, but a joke with consequences for both, and the marvelous thing about Gerwig’s script is that nobody gets away with anything, even good intentions. As with all teen comedies the main thematic thrust is school status and popularity, and when Lady Bird starts avoiding her BFF Julie (Beanie Feldstein) in order to hang out with rich kid Jenna (Odeya Rush) the viewer feels a betrayal that’s both expected and peculiarly hurtful, since Lady Bird herself understands what a cliche she’s become. Similarly, she plays off two suitors, both from “better” families than hers. The fact that Danny (Lucas Hedges) is nicer than the more garishly intellectual Kyle (Timothee Chalamet) is another cliche that doesn’t hurt the film because Lady Bird herself keeps telling herself she’s on the wrong track anyway. As a result the requisite letdown after the requisite losing-her-virginity scene is less dramatic, and more in line with Lady Bird’s singular way of confronting life as something that will inevitably disappoint her.
That’s because Lady Bird’s worldview is informed by class, another standard theme of teen comedies but one that Gerwig has elevated above all others. If Lady Bird is closer affectionately to her father (Tracy Letts) than to her mother, it’s not because of the usual sympathetic father tropes (though there is that), but rather because he really does elicit sympathy. Having recently lost his job, his depression has kicked in and he can’t afford his medication. Though Marion has to work double shifts, she doesn’t gain her daughter’s respect as a result, a dramatic point that Gerwig throws at us—and Lady Bird—with surprising coldness. Even her Catholic school education, which was hoisted on her because her younger, adopted brother’s public school was the site of a knife attack, is seen as a class-centered gambit and one that Lady Bird resists more for what it says about her parents’ lack of money than any residual skepticism about religion. Gerwig knows that any adolescent tale is going to be about the struggle of an ego to escape from the strictures of innocence, but she also understands that the audience lives in the bigger world, and she knows that world well herself. That she could incorporate it so vividly and accurately in her comedy is a feat worth celebrating.
Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024), Toho Cinemas Chanter (050-6868-5001).
Lady Bird home page in Japanese
photo (c) 2017 InterActiveCorp Films LLC/Merie Wallace, courtesy of A24
It’s difficult to grasp what director Lynne Ramsay is trying to accomplish with her new movie. Ostensibly a genre exercise, You Were Never Really Here sketchily outlines the daily grind of a hit man, Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), who specializes in rescuing young girls from the clutches of kidnappers and other bottom feeders. Joe suffers from some form of PTSD that seems to be a combination of battle fatigue and his own early childhood trauma, and Phoenix plays him as a sullen misanthrope who occasionally bursts into uncontrollable tears, but not necessarily because of his bloody work. Ramsay’s style here is similar to that which made her 2001 feature, Morvern Caller, an indie sensation: Smudgy cinematography and random edits that recreate a druggy sensibility. This made sense in Morvern because the protagonist was living a lie that she couldn’t credibly keep up with. With Joe the charged atmospherics are a literal representation of his mindset, and in the end they only work against the trite hit-man arc of the plot.
Recently, Christopher Nolan hailed Stanley Kubrick as the greatest director of all time, mainly for his ability to make nitrate film stock mimic the most sublime visual attributes of great paintings. Though he was thinking of 2001, Barry Lyndon is a better example of this attribute, and Barry Lyndon is the most obvious analog when discussing Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV. This is about as close as we’ll ever get to the richness of Rembrandt on film, and there are whole passages where all we have are closeups of faces that are doing nothing in particular but look like people from the 18th century.
As a long-time resident of Japan whose interaction with the local culture is circumstantial, I don’t believe I have much to add to the conversation that has surrounded Wes Anderson’s latest entertainment and which mostly has to do with whether the director has exploited that culture without really understanding it. At first glance, I was more offended by the anti-cat bias of the storyline, but that, as they say, is just me. Narrative films rarely take the trouble to make whatever milieu they depict accurate in every sense since dramatic considerations usually come first. Generally speaking, if the dramatic elements work for me, I will appreciate, if not necessarily enjoy, the work on hand, and while I’ve had problems with Anderson in the past, I have come to like his movies the more I see them, which means he’s either getting better or I’ve just become used to his purposely quirky presentation.
In the rarefied setting that informs Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest luxury, the title “fashion designer” seems imprecise when describing the vocation of the protagonist, Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis). He’s a dressmaker. All he makes is fine dresses for fine ladies. He is not, in fact, interested in fashion as an art form, though he obviously sees himself as something of an artist. More to the point, he’s an aesthete, a trait that Anderson emphasizes in the broadly conceived opening sequence, which shows Woodcock carrying out his morning ritual of dressing himself and then eating breakfast, preparations that are as vital to his vision of life as a series of beautiful choices as are his selection of fabric and filigree for his apparel.
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It’s a wonder that the incredible tale of the 1973 kidnapping of oil billionaire J. Paul Getty’s grandson hasn’t been dramatized before (for the record, there is presently a TV series covering the same ground), but as it stands this high-concept, low-ambition rendering by Ridley Scott has become more famous for its casting than for whatever insights it brings to the case, and for what it’s worth it’s difficult to believe that Kevin Spacey, unceremoniously dumped from the film after his scenes had been shot, would have captured the peculiar oily charm of Getty the way Christopher Plummer has.
Atsuko Hirayanagi explores familiar screwball archetypes in her debut feature, and while most have been well presented by other Japanese directors, they’ve never attempted them in a cross-cultural setting. Setsuko (Shinobu Terajima) is an uptight, lonely single woman working a deadend OL job in Tokyo and living in a frightfully messy apartment. She seems this close to self-annihilating breakdown when her saucy niece (Shioli Kutsuna) talks her into signing up for English lessons with her teacher, an earnest American named John (Josh Hartnett). With a pedagogic style that uses hugs and wigs to fortify the role play endemic to Japanese language learning, John wins Setsuko over, and she becomes enamored of not only her new persona, Lucy, but John himself. When he suddenly leaves Japan with her niece in tow, she is eager to join her annoyed sister (Kaho Minami) on the California journey to find them. There, the movie opens up in startling ways and you appreciate not only Hirayanagi’s astute understanding of American differences, but also Terashima’s empathy with an inherently unlikable character. (95 min.)
Both Sides of the Sky
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