Lady Bird

The first shot packs the story. Mother and daughter sleep together in matching profiles. They face and reflect each other. The serenity of the shot catches their essential bond, which their respective prickliness does its best to fray in their waking hours.

      Lying there, they look alike. As the father later explains, both women have such strong personalities that their clashing is natural — but their underlying love remains. 

Both women move through trying times with men. Mother Marion works double shifts as a psych nurse. She has to guide the grief-stricken priest who was apparently not saved by directing his school production of Merrily We Roll Along. His “They didn’t get it” suggests the rollicking audience missed the depressing undercurrents to which he is attuned. His successor is made of sterner stuff: directing The Tempest with the blackboard strategies of his football coaching.

At home Marion has to deal with husband Larry’s long battle with depression and his loss of his job. This while dealing with emotional teen Christine and adopted older son Miguel with his live-in girlfriend. The latter explicitly confirms our sense of Marion’s “big heart,” as Christine ultimately realizes.

Christine grows through three boyfriends. The first turns out gay, the second an insensitive pretentious creep and her third — entering NYC — with their first kiss prompts her drunken puke. In consoling her gay friend she shows her mother’s heart. She also briefly abandons her closest girl friend in vain hope of befriending the class’s wealthy, snobbish beauty. As Christine grows through her tribulations Marion barely survives them.

The film closes on three notes of reconciliation. 

The first is Christine’s relationship with her Catholicism. Christine and her friend chafe at the school’s discipline, enjoying a truant snack on communion wafers as they discuss their shower orgasms. Christine is suspended for challenging the church's position on abortion. The nuns seem strict in their “Six inches for the Holy Spirit” rule at the school dance.  But one heartily laughs at Christine’s prank of decorating her car with a Just Married to Jesus. sign. In New York Christine challenges the fashionable young atheist: “People go by the names their parents give them, but they don't believe in God.” 

The solace she finds when she drops in on a Sunday service prompts her second reconciliation. On the long distance phone Christine tells her mother “Thanks” and “I love you.” That’s realizing the tacit harmony we saw in the first shot. Their unity is also the point of intercutting shots of mother and daughter driving through Sacramento. 

Equally important, Christine accepts herself — finally going by her given name Christine instead of yet again insisting on the “Lady Bird” with which has all along tried to romanticize herself. The daughter's and mother's closing harmony ends the film like the last line we hear from the audio-book Grapes of Wrath: Having survived adversity the true power, the woman, smiles.