Last week I wrote about my plans to go see Lady Bird at the Gem. I’m pleased to report that it was a fantastic movie, one I’d happily see over and over again.
The Gem was as packed as I’ve ever seen it on Tuesday — the Spotlight Film organizers said it might have been their best turnout in 14 years of the club. I’m not surprised; lined up outside the theatre five minutes before the movie began, I started to be concerned that I wasn’t going to get a seat. I’ve only lived here for a year and a half, but that never happens in Grand Forks, I’m pretty sure.
The movie centres on Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson, a slightly eccentric senior at a Catholic high school in Sacramento. While the premise of the story is Christine’s process in applying for college and her misadventures along the way, the storyline that made me love the movie was the one between Christine and her mom.
I can tell Lady Bird was a good movie because it inspired a reaction, not only in me but in the rest of the audience as well. I think many mother-daughter relationships are like the one between Christine and her mom — slightly tortured, full of love, having heels dug in.
The movie opens with Christine and her mom driving home from a college visit, listening to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath audiobook. They cry together over the ending, before falling into a spat. Christine says probably my favourite line from the whole movie: “I wish I were living through something.”
Her mom, of course, fires back and soon enough Christine throws herself out of the moving car. She wears the cast for the better part of the movie.
My relationship with my mom was never throw-myself-out-of-a-car dramatic (thankfully), but there were moments in the movie that made me think of her: when Christine’s mom nags her about dragging her feet around the store, and a few minutes later when they swoon over a dress her mom dug out of the rack. And, trying not to spoil it for anyone that hasn’t seen the movie yet, I also empathize with Christine and her mom at the end of the movie. It’s a scene and a feeling I know well, having moved across the country myself.
The rest of what I’ve been watching lately isn’t nearly so accomplished or highbrow.
I was working my way through Grey’s Anatomy, but after lying awake one night convinced that I had a blood clot in my leg and that I was probably going to die by morning, and the next night dreaming that I was dying of cancer, I have convinced myself to stop watching Grey’s Anatomy. I’m not usually a hypochondriac, but the show is a drama where someone might come into the emergency room with persistent hiccups and never leave the hospital again.
It’s easy to talk yourself up after having watched variations on that storyline for 10 seasons. Clearly, I need to put some space between myself and all medical dramas.