SPOILERS AHEAD, BUT IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY SEEN IT WHY ARE YOU READING THIS?
Now reader, you amazing, wonderful reader, I ask you to put aside the intense (and natural) rage that you feel towards me for having put the words “problem” and “Lady Bird” in the same sentence. Now, look me in the eyes as I say this: I LOVE "Lady Bird." We all love "Lady Bird!" It’s a fantastic movie, it captures some aspects of growing up that I didn’t even know I had experienced, it conveys the awe and the horrors we start to feel towards the world as we start to really understand our parts in it.
That scene at the end, when the titular character Lady Bird (now Christine) calls her home to tell her mom about the emotion she felt when she finally drove through her old town; I felt that too. This movie undoubtedly understands youth; what it doesn’t understand is the relationship between parent and child as that youth comes to an end.
If you’ve seen the movie, you’re familiar with the relationship between Lady Bird and her mother. There are moments of pure and utter truth in there. But what bothers me is the fact that despite the terrible things said and done by both Lady Bird and her mom, in the end it is Lady Bird that is left with the weight of reconciling with her mother even though her mom is at fault, and she does it. She calls home. She calls herself Christine again, she cries at church thinking of her home. After her mom hadn’t talked to her for weeks, she just goes and forgives her without a second thought. And why? Because they’re mother and daughter? Is that the message you want to believe in?
I think there’s a lot of affordances being made for the mother, and I don’t appreciate how we’re basically told that even though the mom is passive aggressive, belligerent, and demeaning, we need to excuse that because she doesn’t know how to communicate well and she’s worried about her mistakes. Lady Bird’s mom never directly shows Lady Bird how she loves her, and it’s clear there is some sort of affection between the two, but it’s a love shown through material things like money and clothing, essentials of course, but clearly not what Lady Bird needs.
I’m not saying that I think it’s impossible for Lady Bird and her mother to ever be on good terms again. What I’m saying is, that reconciliation takes time, and a whole lot of effort on both of their parts to see each other differently. It doesn’t come within the first week of leaving for college (when your mom refused to even walk into the airport with you), despite any of our romantic notions about university life I think we can all agree that real change has been a slow and grinding process, full of periods of growth and stagnation, but never quick. Growing up takes time, and I don’t know if "Lady Bird" did that justice.
