Lady Bird – Blu-ray Movie Review

Lady Bird was written and directed by Greta Gerwig. The main narrative focuses on the relationship between the teenaged “Lady Bird” McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) and her mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf). As is prototypical, the basis of the mother-daughte conflict is that the teenager is very much like her parent but wants to establish her independance by being defiant whenever the opportunity presents itself. Lady Bird does not fully appreciate all that her mother is doing to pick up the slack for the father who is out of work. Againat this backdrop, the story sprinkles in some story lines associated with her relationships among and between her high school classmates.

This movie was released to a lot of fanfare because it garnered a very high “Metascore” when it first came out. The movie still enjoys a 94 Metascore on metacritic.com (as of 3-22-18). This is a very high score. That is why I wanted to review this movie. I generally tend to gravitate to movies that are well received by professional critics. In actuality, I was not as smitten by Lady Bird as I had hoped. In many ways, the plot came across as a bit of a “paint-by-numbers” affair. Furthermore, though I felt the principal actresses (Ronan and Metcalf) laid down solid performances, the remainder of the cast was unable to draw me in sufficiently which caused me to feel disconnected from these other characters. So I was a little bit let down by the movie on the whole. This movie still qualifies as a solid rental reccomendation.

Lady Bird was shot in digital so one may think the movie would have high resolution, fine details, and natural colors. Unfortunately, one would be wrong. The production team was looking to have a movie with a sort of melancholy look that would seem like it was playing back in a character’s memory. So they added lots of artificial film grain. They also tweaked the colors with digital filters to further the detached feeling they were going after. I am downgrading the score to four stars because these effects could have been more subtly applied than the semi heavy-handed way in which they were done which detracted from the overall enjoyment of the movie.

The audio fares a little better than the video, but I am still rating it at just four stars because I didn’t hear the level of transparency that can be realized via the high resolution encoding of a Blu-ray disc. This is a dialog-driven movie and the voices were intelligible but lacked a certain realism that I know is possibe. The school musical and party scenes sounded reasonably good and demonstrated the widest dynamics and frequency resposne in the movie.

This package contains two discs – the Blu-ray disc and a DVD. The case also includes a digital code inside. The on-disc extras are sparse but entertaining:

Audio Commentary with Writer/Director Greta Gerwig and Cinematographer Sam Levy and “Realizing Lady Bird” featurette.