Gerwig notes that you can reject grace, too, and for much of the movie Lady Bird seems to reject everything she’s been given: Her mother, her upbringing, her friends, even her name. She rejects her hometown of Sacramento, Calif., most of all, perhaps, pining to go to school somewhere out east “where culture is, like New York or Connecticut or New Hampshire.”
But when she writes a college essay that she gives to Sister Sarah Joan to read, the nun tells Lady Bird that she clearly loves Sacramento.
Lady Bird dismisses the very idea. Love it? She’s been wanting to leave it for seemingly ever. She only admits to paying attention.
And then Sister Sarah Joan tells her something that made me catch my breath.
Isn’t paying attention a manifestation of love?
Gerwig says she was inspired by the writings of Simone Weil: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” Weil wrote. “It presupposes faith and love.”
“I think attention is a devotional act,” Gerwig says. “Paying attention to a person, to a place, it can be an act of love, an act of devotion.”
She wanted that moment between Lady Bird and Sister Sarah Joan to be both profound and throwaway. Lady Bird, Gerwig believes, probably didn’t even fully hear the nun in the moment. “I like it when epiphanies come later,” she says.
And so it does. When Lady Bird finally does leave home, she comes to understand how much home really means to her. How much she loves Sacramento. How much she values her mother. Even the faith she spurned is a part of her now.
In the movie’s last moments, Lady Bird finds herself in church—not because she’s compelled to be there, but because she wants to be there. She listens to a children’s choir, the music rolling through the sanctuary.
Everybody loves Lady Bird, and with good reason. For all its content issues, it’s a movie ultimately about love. And just writing about it makes me want to watch it again.
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