Lady Bird attends a Catholic school her senior year, though she’s not Catholic. Indeed, she seems almost hostile to faith at first, flashing middle fingers during Mass and never accepting communion. She snidely decorates a nun’s minivan as if for a honeymoon, scrawling “Married to Jesus” on the back window.
Two-thirds through the movie, you might be inclined to believe the film dismisses Catholicism and Christianity. Lady Bird, the character, certainly does. But the movie doesn’t go there. The nun, Sister Sarah Joan (played marvelously by Lois Smith), laughs off Lady Bird’s stunt: She thought it was funny, and besides, she has been married to Jesus, in a sense, for more than 40 years. She’s kind and relatable and real: No cartoonish, ruler-slapping tyrant, this one.
Like Lady Bird, Gerwig went to Catholic School. Like Lady Bird, she was not, and still isn’t, Catholic. But she “loved” the school and really appreciated the nuns and priests who worked there.
“A lot of them were just incredibly compassionate and funny and empathetic and thoughtful,” she says. She wanted to replicate her impressions in her movie, and so the religious characters here are deeply sympathetic (even if they’re dealing with their own struggles and imperfections). And they, like Lady Bird’s family, shower Lady Bird with almost constant grace—grace that the girl doesn’t even know she’s getting most of the time.
“I’ve always been fascinated with the concept of grace,” Gerwig says. “I remember grace being explained to me as completely unexpected and wholly undeserved. … One of the reasons you baptize babies (in Catholicism) is you can’t earn it. It’s given to you. I always thought of that as a beautiful thing. You can get this love and this grace that you didn’t earn. I find this concept incredibly moving … I wanted to find a way to weave that into the story without being too heavy-handed about it.”
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