Joan Didion was a hit at this year’s New York Film Festival, receiving a long standing ovation at a screening of “The Center Will Not Hold,” the documentary chronicling her life made by her nephew Griffin Dunne. But Didion can be thought of as the spiritual godmother of another great film at the festival — Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird.” The film opens with an epigraph from Didion: “Anyone who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.” “Lady Bird” is a fraught love letter to Sacramento, the hometown of Didion, Gerwig, and…not many others in a cultural sense. Sacramento is in many ways the unloved stepchild of California, forever lost in the glamorous shadow of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Representations of Sacramento in popular culture are few and far between; before “Lady Bird,” its only recent film appearance was the brief moment Gerwig’s character in “Frances Ha” returned to her home there.
To put it bluntly, Sacramento isn’t a place where many artists have come from, which is exactly why it was so revelatory for a young Greta Gerwig to discover the writings of Didion, the arch-sophisticate cultural observer from her hometown. She says, “When I discovered her writing as a young teenager, it was spiritually seismic. It was as shattering as if I’d grown up in Dublin and then suddenly read James Joyce. She was my personal poet laureate. It was the first time I experienced an artist’s eye looking at my home. I had always thought art and writing had to be about things that were ‘important,’ and I was certain that my life was not at all important.”
“Lady Bird” belongs to a long tradition of coming-of-age narratives of artists who have to leave their hometown to gain the critical distance to both reconcile their feelings towards it and depict it in their art. Gerwig picked the perfect example in Joyce, who left his hometown of Dublin as a young man and spent the rest of his life writing about it in dizzying detail, forever cementing his conception of Dublin in the cultural imagination. “Lady Bird” may not be a literal autobiography of Gerwig, but it belongs in the same category as Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and other stories of artistic self-realization. At the onset of the movie, Lady Bird complains “I want to live through something,” and she spends the entire movie trying to get herself out of Sacramento and to the glittering cultural capital of New York City. Her very name conveys a yearning for flight. Only at the end of this process does she realize the deep hold Sacramento will always have on her, whether she lives there or not. When Lois Smith’s shrewd nun, Sister Sarah Joan, praises Lady Bird’s essay about her hometown, Lady Bird demurs, saying she supposed she had paid attention. Sister Sarah Joan replies, suggesting that love and attention are one and the same.
Joan Didion might agree with Sister Sarah Joan. In her collection “The White Album,” Didion writes, “Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner… A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.” If this is true, with the release of “Lady Bird,” Greta Gerwig may have wrested possession of Sacramento from Didion herself. The movie is a passionate act of remembrance, providing an indelible portrait of both Sacramento and adolescence in the year 2002. The film is other things too, a coming-of-age and an affecting story of mother-daughter conflict, but Lady Bird’s reconciliation with her hometown is a crucial symbolic element of those stories as well. The film’s emotional climax is the heartfelt message Christine (no longer Lady Bird) leaves for her mother once she’s reached New York, remembering intimate details of moments with her mother in Sacramento, like the bends in the roads they took. Sacramento and her mother Marion are intertwined for Lady Bird; she struggles to escape both, is defined by that struggle, and only with distance can she learn to love them for what they gave her.
“Lady Bird” is an excellent addition to the coming-of-age canon; culturally sharp, socio-economically aware, and fiercely individual. Hopefully it inaugurates a directing career for Gerwig as long and fruitful as Didion’s writing career and hopefully it inspires a new generation of young people to realize their potential to be artists no matter where they come from.
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