‘Lady Bird’ Finds Beauty In Its Blemishes

You could say that Lady Bird is about an annoyingly ordinary teenaged girl. She’s in the high school drama club, but she can only nab bit parts. She dreams of going to a bougie East Coast school, but her grade point average is decidedly too average for most admissions boards. (I mean, her own guidance counselor meanly guffaws when Lady Bird says she’d like to go to Yale.) She’s so ordinary that she creates an aura of specialness for herself in the guise of her “given name,” i.e. a name that she has given herself. Hence, she is “Lady Bird,” and not Christine, the modest name she really was given.

Oh, and Lady Bird has bad skin. She’s that normal.

It might seem like the most superficial detail to zero in on, but Lady Bird McPhearson’s acne-flecked cheeks matter. They matter cosmetically in terms of helping transform twenty-something actress Saoirse Ronan into a California teen. The stripped down makeup, the imperfect skin…it’s the face of a suburban girl and not an ingenue who’s strutted down the red carpet in a stunning emerald gown. It’s a face you’ll see in homerooms across the nation, and not in glossy magazine profiles. It’s a face that can look in a thrift store mirror and want more. 

When Gerwig closes in on Ronan’s face on screen, she makes sure to highlight Lady Bird’s dun skin as much as Ronan’s outrageously beautiful jewel-toned eyes. In a film devoted to details, a choice like this signals that our flaws are as important as our gifts. All of us matters and all of us do matter. 

There is, in truth, something glorious about the specific kind of blemished skin Lady Bird has. It’s not laughably, impossibly bad. Other movies would air brush the bejesus out of its stars, or use a comically placed zit as a plot device. Gerwig includes Lady Bird’s acne in an understated, beautiful way.  Lady Bird’s skin is merely lackluster. It doesn’t distract from who she is or what she is doing. It doesn’t even seem to impair her dating life, as scores of teen-focused beauty magazines and skin toner ads constantly suggest. Growing up, just about every teen girl in my high school had similarly “meh” skin, but I’ve never actually seen skin like that on screen. In Lady Bird, acne not only exists, it’s just there. Her flaws are there on display for us to see, notice, and consider. 

Lady Bird’s blemishes also amplify the themes of the film in a beautifully delicate way. Writer/director Greta Gerwig follows her protagonist during her senior year of high school, the suburban American’s chute straight to adulthood. This means that even Lady Bird’s structure seems plain. “Seems.” I’ve heard people knock the film because “nothing happens.” My millennial retort to that is “everything happens.” Gerwig directs Lady Bird with a type of precision that isn’t coldly calculating, but overwhelmingly warm. You can see this in how she edits the film to highlight small interpersonal moments that mean so much. Every detail caught on screen, good or bad, embarrassing or illuminating, helps construct the tapestry of Lady Bird’s life.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the movie lately, in terms of its apparent flaws. We are just days away from the Oscars, an awards show my colleague Joe Reid has aptly called, “cinematic Thunderdome.” Now is the time to dish about movies’ failings — and Lady Bird is ironically a film about flaws and failings.

It’s a perfectly made film about the imperfect, with a protagonist who is the kind of girl movies aren’t supposed to be made about. She’s not a hero. She’s not a villain. She’s not a victim. She’s just a girl from Sacramento who is learning how to be proud of all that she is. It’s emphatically a film about discovering the beauty in the ordinary… Our faults are worth love. Let’s hail the beauty in our blemishes. 

Where to Stream Lady Bird