Dorsey’s review published on Letterboxd:
Lady Bird is so warm. I saw it two weeks ago and have struggled to explain exactly how and why I love it so much, because the reasons are endless. It’s something I know in my bones, like deja vu, like being called out on all the stupid things I said and did when I was a teenager, with a pat on the back that says, “It’s alright, I did that, too.”
It feels like a collection of scenes from a real life, not Hollywood-sensationalized, but still magical in every word and every emotion, like a year extracted right from my own memories. The beginning of a lifetime of unspecial sex. The pretentious anti-establishment boyfriend who isn’t self-aware enough to realize that the establishment is built to privilege him. The dance that doesn’t go as planned, the shallow relationships with friends of friends that seem so important at the time, the stunning realization once you’re on the cusp of adulthood that your parents have entire inner lives of their own outside of you.
It’s so hard to find movies about teenage girls that feel real. Heartbreaking without being melodramatic, joyful without being cloying, so funny that it hurts without the joke being “haha, young women are stupid and vapid.”
Remember the end of high school? Those bizarre twilight months of our childhood? Weren’t we all just full of hope while being painfully hopeless at the same time? Trying to grow up and figure our lives, and ourselves out, and just not being very good at it? Like, at all?
In Lady Bird, life is a joke and life is beautiful, in the dry orange of barely-suburbia and the wet pavement of the city. I can’t wait to relive it.
