Wasting time on the Internet, I spotted a recent run-down of the 25 all-time best religious movies. I expected the list would contain a lot of Bible epics as well as faith-based old clunkers like The Nun’s Story and Going My Way. (Yes, both have their charm, but they seem awfully far away from life as we know it in the 21st century.) Instead, what I saw was an intelligent cluster of films in which religious faith and religious affiliations of multiple sorts take center stage, even if the central characters are grappling with religion rather than simply believing.
The list contains some oldies, like Black Narcissus (1947) as well as Ingmar Bergman’s astonishing duo from 1957, Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal. Some of the choices reflect religious traditions other than our familiar ones: see Atanarjuat The Fast Runner, a 2001 prize-winner from Canada that meticulously reflects Inuit culture and language. The luminous Ida, a 2013 Polish film about a nun-to-be who uncovers her Nazi-era past, is a natural for this list, but I hadn’t expected to find Minari or 12 Years a Slave or There Will Be Blood, all of which do in fact have something to say about faith. Of course I was gratified to see the great Schindler’s List in a place of honor. But the inclusion that surprised and pleased me most was that of a film I recently watched for the second time, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017).
Lady Bird, which apparently hews closely to writer/director Gerwig’s own early life, is the story of a seventeen-year-old girl finishing up high school in Sacramento, California. (She’s played with conviction by Saiorse Ronan, who was 23 at the time.) Lady Bird is a proudly independent thinker who has given herself a new jazzy name in place of the much more predictable one with which her parents gifted her at birth. But despite the fact that she yearns to boldly enter the adult world, she’s got to finish out her classes at a benign but deeply conventional Catholic high school, where her teachers are priests and nuns. She auditions for the school play, struggles with math, and occasionally butts heads with visiting anti-abortion speakers, while also hanging out with her best pal, falling in and out of love, (with both Lucas Hedges and Timothée Chalamet) and pretending that she lives in a mansion-like local residence instead of a slightly shabby tract home.
As Lady Bird sees it, the biggest cross she has to bear is her mother, a kind-hearted but outspoken nurse who struggles to do what’s best for her headstrong daughter. Mom (Laurie Metcalf) is the practical member of the family, unlike Dad (Tracy Letts), an out-of-work dreamer who would deny his child nothing. Lady Bird has her heart set on an east-coast college (in “a city with culture”) and Dad somehow scrapes together the financials. But it’s only when she’s far from home, and dealing with an acute physical and emotional crisis of her own making, that Lady Bird comes to recognize how much she relies on both an actual home and a spiritual one. For the first time, she reverts to her birth name (Christine) and enters a church of her own volition.
It’s a simple but wholly convincing story, anchored by strong performances and Gerwig’s sure hand on the helm. Ultimately it was nominated for 5 Oscars, two for Ronan’s and Metcalf’s work and three for Gerwig in her various functions. Alas, it won none of them. Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea, and the ill-faced La La Land were the big winners.
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