The last time the Arts & Faith community released a Top 100 Spiritually Significant films list, I campaigned hard for Lady Bird’s inclusion. It finished in the bottom ten. This time I shared an essay of mine on the spirituality of Gerwig’s filmography and repeatedly plugged it as a richly deserving nominee. It finished at #100.
Naturally, I am overjoyed with its first-time appearance on any Arts & Faith list, even if its ranking clearly indicates that there are those who do not appreciate Lady Bird in a spiritual sense. Indeed, I expected Barbie with its creation narrative and Kubrickian homages (especially to our perennial favorite 2001: A Space Odyssey) to be the Gerwig film that took a bigger step in breaking the male-director barrier. Throughout the whole voting process; however, I was adamant that if any Gerwig film made the list, it should be Lady Bird.
A coming-of-age film about a rebellious teenager and a controlling mother may not seem an obvious candidate for spiritual significance, even with the Catholic school backdrop against which the story unfolds. I’d like to argue that the grace extended to the characters by one another and by the film itself creates a world ripe with spirituality that permeates the humor and pathos of the film. There are two scenes that have been glued into my mind’s eye and ear ever since I first saw Lady Bird eight years ago. (As an enormous fan of Frances Ha and Mistress America, I was eagerly anticipating Gerwig’s solo directorial debut.)
The first of these scenes is the final exchange with Sister Sarah Joan (Lois Smith) and Saoirse Ronan’s headstrong protagonist. As high school graduation gets nearer and decisions about college and career loom, a guidance session with the compassionate principal of Lady Bird’s Catholic high school yields an exchange that concludes with the notion that love and paying attention might be the same thing.
The second of these scenes is the finale; I won’t spoil it for those who have not seen Lady Bird, as I have no desire to taint the joy of experiencing it for the first time. I will say the crosscutting between two characters creates an emotional bond of grace and a connection beyond mere physicality. The monologue accompanying this scene is first and foremost an extending of grace to oneself and then to others who have made attempts to seek forgiveness. Whether that forgiveness and reconciliation are achieved is beyond the final frame of the film, but the spiritual components that connect people whose paths have significantly crossed are emphasized in a way that suggests how much the things we take for granted shape who we are and our interconnections among our family, friends, and strangers.
Having seen the film over a dozen times through the lens of those two scenes, it becomes endlessly richer and more rewarding. Lady Bird becomes not a teen manifesto of self-identity and recalcitrance with a coda about the transformation into acceptance and mature relationships, but a comedy of errors where our screw-ups, triumphs, insights, heartbreaks, friendships, dreams, and relationships are all cut from the same cloth that cloaks this cinematic world in love. The attention Gerwig pays to all those details in all the characters’ lives—from the bratty rich girl (Odeya Rush) to the long-time best friend (Beanie Feldstein), from the first boyfriend struggling with identity (Lucas Hedges) to the sexy bad boy (Timothée Chalamet), to the adopted half-brother (Jordan Rodrigues) and his live-in girlfriend (Michelle Scott), to the understanding father (Tracy Letts), and to the overbearing mother (Laurie Metcalf)—is staggering. Even at any character’s worst, there is still a distinctive, recognizable human being behind their poor choices.
The choices that shape the intensely dynamic relationship between Laurie Metcalf’s Marion McPherson and Saoirse Ronan’s Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson are the heart of the film. A mother-daughter relationship is strongly formative (for good or ill), and Gerwig gives us one that oscillates between both respectful healthy support and dismissive emotional abuse. Metcalf and Ronan are so good in their roles that it is possible to overlook one or both ends of that spectrum between their mother and daughter. However, overlooking that would deny both characters their full humanity. The picture of this mother and daughter with its warts, freckles, bruises, hugs, and smiles is what makes the dynamic so compelling. The worst of their actions are not whitewashed, but simply depicted with the question of how do these people choose to move forward from defining moments such as these.
I went back and forth on whether to include the following, but I think it highlights Gerwig’s sensitivity, love, and grace throughout Lady Bird. As a transwoman with a chosen name, I suppose it could be strange that I so passionately adore a film in which the protagonist rejects a chosen name in favor of embracing her birth name as a means of reconciling with a mother whose actions at times constitute emotional abuse. For the question of what’s in a name, Lady Bird was a moniker of rebellion, not a gender identity. Christine is a birth name, but embracing that identity is not an erasure of Lady Bird’s high school years; it is a transition of going off to college, starting a new chapter of life, and acknowledge the roots that helped put her there. Indeed, there would be nothing significant about Christine accepting her name if it had not grown from her high school identity and all the highs, lows, and middles of life that led to that moment. I would argue a trans person embracing a chosen name signifies a similar moment in the same type of journey. That Gerwig can hold all these ideas in one sequence and one final frame is remarkable. It is even more remarkable that she can extend such quiet moments of grace until a sunbeam shines through at one of life’s crummiest moments, and the setting and lighting at that moment invite us to pay attention and love one another. — Evalyn Cogswell (2025)
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