N.B.: This review contains spoilers!
When Greta Gerwig’s Barbie came out last summer, it seemed like everyone was talking about it and dissecting it for months on end (I’m guilty of this myself, as I wrote about it for Current). But out of her growing corpus of work - which now includes three films, as well as apparently an upcoming new adaptation of the Narnia books? - Gerwig’s directorial debut remains my favourite.
I first watched Ladybird around the time it came out in 2018, when I was myself barely older than its main character. I have little recollection of my initial impression, other than that I was struck by its final scene. Ladybird - who, by the end of the film, comes to accept her given name of Christine again - wakes up in the hospital, exhausted and confused after a night of heavy drinking at her new university in New York. She realises it’s Sunday, and finds herself going into a church, despite having mostly scoffed at organised religion while attending a Roman Catholic high school. She calls her parents, and it becomes clear that, for all her pretentions at disliking her home town of Sacramento and her overbearing mother, she misses both terribly. I found this incredibly poignant. It was enough to store Ladybird at the back of my mind as a film that I should one day rewatch.
After reading an excellent article by Abigail Wilkinson Miller about Gerwig’s brand of feminism, I knew the time had come. The very, very short version of this review is that Ladybird made both me and my husband cry. But it wasn’t moving in a sentimental way, in the kind fabricated Hollywood way. It didn’t demand an emotional response; it simply slowly built up to one.
On the surface, Ladybird is as simple as a film can get: it’s just over an hour and a half long, and it’s a classic coming-of-age story about a girl in her last year of high school who can’t wait to grow up and leave her home behind. She doesn’t like Sacramento. She doesn’t like her mother (her father she likes more, because in some ways he is more indulgent). She doesn’t like her all-girls Catholic high school. She thinks religion and rules and conventions are stupid. She wants to be *not like other girls*, and so she dyes her hair red and insists that she be called ‘Ladybird’ instead of Christine. Most films that fit that general description are cliched, pastel-coloured, idealised versions of what it’s like to be a teenager. On the other hand, Gerwig’s vision rang so true that it made me entirely identify with its main character, even though I’m years out of university, and I’m now a mother of two.
There are many things that Ladybird is about, and many things that it gets right. Let’s get the technical aspects out of the way first. I am no expert in filmmaking, so I’ll leave the cinematography for other people to judge. But the writing! Ladybird is sublimely written; it’s a masterclass in ‘show, don’t tell’; it manages to say so much in so little time. I thought my favourite writer-director was Whit Stillman (whose Metropolitan from the early 90s is one of my all-time favourites, and whose more recent film Damsels in Distress features Gerwig in an acting role), but I’m proven wrong. While Stillman’s witty dialogue can occasionally veer into the clever-for-its-own-sake - in the same way that some Oscar Wilde comedies can - Gerwig’s wit is never self-referential, and never smug. Though her protagonist Christine is sharp-tongued, she’s never so in an unrealistic way, and sections of verbal virtuosity are alternated with all-too-believable scenes of pure teenage awkwardness, full of embarrassing silences and angsty shouting.
The other two aspects of the film which are so brilliant, are the relationship between Christine and her mother Marion, and Christine’s conflicted feelings about her home town. The very first scene sets the tone for the rest of the film. Christine and her mother are calmly listening to an audiobook of The Grapes of Wrath in the car, getting emotional together over the ending of the novel. It’s clear that they love each other deeply. But within seconds, they start arguing about Christine’s plans for the future, and it quickly escalates into a fully-fledged row. Christine jumps out the still moving car, breaks her arm, and has to get a cast. Later in the film, as mother and daughter are trying on dresses together, the dynamic reverts, with an argument between the two resolving itself as Marion comments on how lovely her daughter looks in the very dress that Saoirse Ronan’s Christine wears in the movie poster.
That kind of volatile relationship is what most teenagers experience with at least one of their parents for least a few years. Of course, when I first watched Ladybird I found Marion unreasonable and overbearing (which she is, in some ways at least), but now, as a mother, I can see that she is simply doing what all mothers train themselves to do for years and years: she is trying to minimise the danger that Christine will ever get hurt, even if that means squashing Christine’s will out in the process. It’s true that there are financial considerations at play, but that doesn’t seem to be at the root of Marion’s insistence that Christine go to college near home, rather than on the East Coast. Marion wants to keep Christine close. That’s suffocating to her daughter, as it would be to any teenager, but mothers are simply not built to let go. We spend years and years keeping our children as close to us as possible (in the first year or so, literally on us most of the time). Delegating responsibility feels unnatural; realising that a child is his or her own person, separate from your own sense of personhood, is almost unthinkable.
This is exactly what Christine and Marion are negotiating throughout the film. When Christine eventually does go to university in New York, an angry Marion refuses to see her off at the airport; but a moment later, once Christine has left, Marion is seen embracing her husband and crying. It makes sense, doesn’t it? She knows she needs to let her daughter go - but it’s breaking her heart.
From Christine’s perspective, the separation is also painful, though in an entirely different way. There was a scene that struck me as being emblematic of the problem we all face when our parents start to think of us as individuals, rather than just as their children. In the midst of another argument, Christine tells her mother, ‘I wish that you liked me’. Marion immediately responds, ‘Of course I love you’, which is not what Christine was asking or wanted to hear. ‘But do you like me?’, she insists. It wouldn’t occur to a seven-year-old to ask her mother if she likes her - all she has to do is provide for her needs. But it would occur to a seventeen-year-old. Marion and Christine are beginning to relate to each other as adult, as individuals. It’s a painful, but also a necessary and healthy time of transition. Once my own children get to that age, I think a rewatch of Ladybird might help me cope with it.
The other crucially important relationship in Ladybird is not that of Christine with either of her boyfriends, or with her best friend, or even with her father. It’s her relationship to her home town of Sacramento. I believe Gerwig herself is from Sacramento and went to a Catholic high school there; it makes sense that the film feels autobiographical, because, to an extent at least, it is.
Loving the place we come from is a funny thing. Since leaving my village by the Italian Alps now ten years ago, I have lived in three different countries, for different lengths of time. I went to university in England; I had my son in Canada; I got pregnant with my daughter in the States. Although I don’t have a strong sense of attachment to Italy anymore - mostly because all my friends, as well as my mother, don’t actually live there - I do feel very, very deeply attached to England. When I left to live in Toronto and then Indiana, I can now see in retrospect, I desperately needed a change of scenery, and going very far from home was the best thing I could have done. But when we moved back to Oxford last year, it truly felt like coming home. We baptised our baby girl in the same church where we’d got married almost three years before. It was a feeling of peace and satisfied longing.
In Ladybird, Christine experiences a similar kind of fraught love for Sacramento. She says she hates it, but she doesn’t; not really. In another brilliantly written scene, Christine is discussing her options for university with Sister Sarah Joan. This is their exchange:
Sister Sarah Joan: You clearly love Sacramento.
Christine: I do?
Sister Sarah Joan: You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care.
Christine: I was just describing it.
Sister Sarah Joan: Well, it comes across as love.
Christine: Sure, I guess I pay attention.
Sister Sarah Joan: Don't you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?
In a parallel moment to Christine’s conversation with her mother, loving and liking are contrasted here, too. What Christine means is that she doesn’t like Sacramento; it feels small and restrictive. But she still loves it: she knows its streets; all of her core memories are associated with it, for better or for worse. Even though she wants to - and indeed, does - leave her home by the end of the film, Sacramento provides for Christine a sense of rootedness and belonging. What Sacramento is to Ladybird’s heroine, Oxford is to me. It’s a place I love even during times when I don’t like it. The way Christine feels about it is perhaps similar to the way her own mother Marion feels about her: it’s love without the need for approval. While in a romantic relationship one needs both admiration (‘liking’) and affection (‘loving’ or, in Sister Sarah Joan’s words, ‘paying attention’), there is no such requirement between parents and children. Parents love their children unconditionally, including without the condition that they like or esteem their children (I certainly feel no strong sense of admiration for my toddler when he throws yogurt at me). Similarly, when we set roots in a place, we come to love it with all its faults.
I began this review with the final scene of Ladybird, and I shall return to it now. After her night partying with her new university friends, Christine calls her parents, and her words are the final ones of the film:
Hi, Mom and Dad, it's me, Christine. It's the name you gave me. It's a good one. Dad, this is more for Mom. Hey, Mom, did you feel emotional the first time that you drove in Sacramento? I did and I wanted to tell you, but we weren't really talking when it happened. All those bends I've known my whole life, and stores, and the whole thing. But I wanted to tell you I love you. Thank you, I'm... thank you.
Christine is, perhaps to her own surprise, homesick. Alone in New York, she is forced to confront the very desire for rootedness which she had spent her senior year eschewing. Longing for the future and the new has turned into longing for the past and the known, and this could only happen precisely because she’s left home. This puts me in mind of the T. S. Eliot quotation from Little Gidding:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
For Christine, travelling to New York was a way of finding - at least metaphorically - her way back home. She looks at Sacramento with fresh eyes, and, as Eliot puts it, is able to ‘know the place for the first time’.
Not only has distance reminded her of how much she loves Sacramento, but it’s also shown her that, just as her mother will always love her, regardless of whether she ‘likes’ her or not, so too she must learn to love her parents. Growing up is at least partly about loving our parents in a more reciprocal way than we’ve been used to as children. It’s about trying and failing and trying again to love our parents unconditionally, as they strive to love us unconditionally, too.
As you can see, I adored Ladybird. I’ll be thinking about and rewatching this film for many years to come, and can’t wait to see what Gerwig writes next. If you’ve made it to the end of this long review, thank you for reading! What film should I review next? Let me know in the comments, and have a wonderful weekend.