Many are seeing themselves in “Lady Bird” (out now), Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut about a Catholic high-school girl (Saoirse Ronan) who dreams of leaving her humble hometown for New York City. Set in 2003, the film perfectly captures growing up in the suburbs in the late ’90s and early aughts, when cellphones were “just for emergencies,” Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash Into Me” sounded impossibly romantic and vacant parking lots were cool hangouts filled with possibility.
But for students and alums of one California high school, the resemblance to their own lives is particularly uncanny in this film. I know, because I went to the school myself.
‘“I was astonished to see how much the story reflected my life experiences.’
Ronan’s character, Lady Bird (nee Christine), is a senior at a fictional all-girls Catholic high school called Sacred Heart set near Sacramento’s posh Fabulous 40s neighborhood, where Ronald Reagan lived when he was governor and not far from where Joan Didion grew up. In real life, Gerwig graduated from St. Francis, an all-girls Catholic high school about a dozen blocks from the 40s, in 2002.
I graduated in 1998, after roaming the halls in the same polyester pleated skirt Lady Bird wears, testing out my fresh driver’s license on the same sweeping Sacramento streets the movie lovingly portrays, crushing on a cute, young math teacher who bore a strikingly resemblance to a character in the film, and forming the sort of close female friendships — uniquely fortified by single-sex education and minor rebellions against nuns — that the characters in the movie have.
“Lady Bird” opened in New York and Los Angeles last week to critical raves. It expands this week to Sacramento and elsewhere on Friday, and the halls of St. Francis — and the Facebook feeds of its alums — are buzzing.
“The student’s are really excited; it’s really touching,” says Cheryl Watson, the drama teacher at St. Francis who taught Gerwig years ago and remembers her fondly as a “really intelligent” and “very intuitive” student. (My own work in Watson’s class was less memorable.)
Watson, whose daughter was friends with Gerwig in high school and has a small part in the film, says, “I laughed and cried, even though it was fictional, there are certain similarities, the essence and the heart are very much like St. Francis … I’m getting notes from former students who say she [Greta] really nailed it.”
Sydney Bembry is one such student. She graduated from St. Francis in May and left Sacramento for college in New York City, just like Lady Bird.
“I was astonished to see how much the story reflected my life experiences over the past year, mostly Lady Bird’s relationship with her mom and her desire to escape Sacramento for the East Coast,” says 18-year-old Bembry, now a freshman at St. John’s University in Queens. “I texted my mom immediately after the movie ended [and said], ‘I love you, and I’m sorry I was such an a - - hole last year.’”