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Trigger warning: After arguing in the car in the opening scene of "Lady Bird," Greta Gerwig's new film, Lady Bird's mother (played by Laura Metcalf) goes all the way in envisioning the downward route her daughter's life will take. The girl's ( Saoirse Ronan) reaction is a gesture that would be regarded as a suicide attempt in real-world terms, but which in the film is treated as a sight gag. Thus, her medical care does not include rehab.
This isn't the only such "trigger" cinematic moment in "Lady Bird." There's her rejection of a gay boy and her uncool best friend, her racist attitude towards her adoptive Latino brother's success, and her hospitalization following a drinking bout.
Yet the film succeeds due to Gerwig's deft comic touch in presenting all these traumas - traumas of which Lady Bird is both a victim and a perpetrator. In fact, it is the director's touch that enables us to digest all of these events without ourselves being traumatized. After all, America's greatest prewar comedy director, Ernst Lubitsch, made a classic comedy starring Jack Benny about the Nazis and antiSemitism in Poland - "To Be or Not To Be." Indeed, it is the defining work of what cinemasts define as "The Lubitsch Touch."
The most upsetting parts of the film were for me Lady Bird's mother's absolute refusal to love her daughter for, and allow her to be, herself, leading to Lady Bird's heart-rending plea: "What if this IS the best version of myself I can be?" ("Cut the kid a break," you may feel - as I did - like screaming.)
And the film is a testament to a girl's, a woman's, self-acceptance, acceptance of her given name, her identity, her skill set (weak in math, obedience, and resistance to peer-group approval - strong in humor, creativity, and persistence) and, yes, acceptance of her mother and her family.
How is Lady Bird able to accomplish this? In part it's due to a nurturing, if depressed, father. In part it's due to Lady Bird's irrepressible genius. In part it's due to the support of friends and adult figures, each with his or her own emotional and situational limitations (her teachers are, after all, nuns).
And, so, Lady Bird gets through sex, drugs, alcohol, emotional rejection (which she both suffers and causes) BECAUSE SHE HAS NO DISEASES. Which is (or at least once was) the most usual course of events.
Why would an artist (a Jewish one yet) make a comedy about the Nazi occupation of Poland? Or about a mother rejecting her daughter? Because it's one nontraumatic way of overcoming negative, but commonplace, human experiences. The worst outcome for the Benny character in the Lubitsch film was his wife spurning him sexually. On the other hand, she risks her life to save his. The film is an affirmation of "to be."
Thankfully, in Sacramento in the 1990s, Gerwig wasn't given, and doesn't adopt, a trauma or a disease label, and thus she got to grow into the best human being - the one that her mother wanted her "to be," even though her mother's image of what that best person might be was "not to be."
Gerwig's film is thus a period piece, to be relished as an almost lost memory at a time when growing through normal developmental phases is now seen as comprising an act of recovery from some permanent disease. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/opinion/sunday/drug-addiction-rec…
