Second place:
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) [86 points / 15 votes]
And the winner is…
Lady Bird [136 points / 20 votes]
“One of the most vital aspects of any film intently focused upon the growth and development of a single person is the community that surrounds them. Whether for good or ill, no individual living in society is truly unaffected by the people living around them, and thus care must be taken to represent the person’s family, friends, and acquaintances in a manner both legible and complex.
“In making Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig and her casting team – Heidi Griffiths, Allison Jones, Toni Staniewicz, and Jordan Thaler – assembled one of the finest casts of the past few decades. Notably, many of the significant actors also appear in some of the other best films of the year: Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name, Tracy Letts in The Post, Lois Smith in Marjorie Prime. But casting is just one part of an ensemble, and what makes this particular assemblage of actors so extraordinary is their harmony. Anchored around Saoirse Ronan’s truly brilliant performance, the cast creates Sacramento circa 2003 with an innate sense of care.
“Certainly, some of the actors have rightly received more attention than others: Ronan, Laurie Metcalf as her mother, and Tracy Letts as her father. However, the acuteness with which the performances are executed is such that a student with a single line of dialogue can make a sizable impact, a football coach turned drama teacher that on paper could seem like a one-note caricature is performed with such vigor that he becomes dynamic. The viewer gets the feeling that almost every single actor with a speaking part has the ability to hold a shot or a scene by themselves with no problem, and indeed this occurs at multiple points in this film – notably, with Stephen McKinley Henderson and Beanie Fieldstein, among others – even as it keeps its focus upon a single woman coming of age.
“If Lady Bird is ultimately, as the film suggests, about its main character’s largely unspoken love for her mother and her hometown, the ensemble acts as a brilliant reinforcement of that sentiment. No character is ever played with condescension or lack of understanding, and all involved consciously strive for a lightness of being that only further grounds their characters in a lived-in, genuine experience.” ~ Ryan Swen
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