Joan Didion is from Sacramento, and so is Greta Gerwig—the idiosyncratic star releasing her excellent solo directorial debut, Lady Bird, this weekend. Like so many of us who cling to the stars born in our hometowns, Gerwig held tight to the knowledge of Didion’s origins for years. Discovering that Didion was born in Sacramento was “spiritually seismic,” Gerwig says in the film’s production notes, “as shattering as if I’d grown up in Dublin and suddenly read James Joyce.”
It is not incidental, then, that Lady Bird itself is also set in Sacramento, and that it opens with a Didion quote splashed against a black screen: “Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.”
The quote comes from a 1979 New York Times profile of Didion, written by Michiko Kakutani. The author says it while looking out the window on a flight from Los Angeles to Sacramento, sighing about California’s reputation as a reckless playground for flower children and fuckups. To her, the city represents something more historical. Her Sacramento origins stretch back five generations, hearkening to an era that couldn’t be further from the hippie-splashed streets of San Francisco or the glinting glamour of Los Angeles. Those cities are rock ’n’ roll; Sacramento has the timbre of old-world Americana.
Lady Bird is about many things, but is at its core a love letter to that city. The story follows a high-school student (played by Saoirse Ronan) who’s fed up with her Sacramento upbringing and longs to move out to the East Coast for college in order to access a less suburban, more interesting world. It is also about the exquisite fragility of teendom and mother-daughter relationships, set against Gerwig’s meticulous magic-hour footage. Lady Bird rages against the seeming mundanity of her city: it’s boring! Artless! Dead! But like so many angsty teenagers, there is a part of her that cannot escape where she comes from.
Both Lady Bird and Gerwig cast themselves in junior Didion molds, artistic spirits who want to flee somewhere more famous—only to look back on the town they left with a warm, nostalgic lens. But unlike Lady Bird, Gerwig has always viewed Sacramento as a “magical” place.
Like Didion, Gerwig eventually decamped to Manhattan, becoming part of the artistic scene. She wrote and starred in films shot around the city, which created a certain kind of recognition. People assumed she was a native New Yorker, a fact that irked her. When she began cobbling together the idea for Lady Bird, she was staunchly determined to set her directorial debut in the California town.
“Sacramento is where I grew up, so I felt like it had not been given its proper due in cinema,” she told Variety.
She had snuck the city into her art before: there is a scene in Frances Ha, the 2013 film she starred in and co-wrote with partner Noah Baumbach, in which her Manhattan-based character heads back home to Sacramento to visit her family. Frances’s parents are played by two local Sacramentans: Gerwig’s real mother and father, Christine and Gordon.
Though Gerwig is still based in New York, Lady Bird could perhaps be her symbolic “hello to all that” moment, a statement piece that marks a new era in her work. In a 2016 interview, she said she hopes to shoot more films in the city in the future.
And it’s all, in a way, thanks to flint that was sparked by discovering Didion’s work, particularly her fondness for her hometown and her dedication to complex female characters (outsiders who are also survivors, as Kakutani observed). In her production notes, Gerwig reflects on the shift that occurred within her when she dove into Didion’s writing.
“It was the first time I experienced an artist’s eye looking at my home,” she said. “I had always thought art and writing had to be about things that were ‘important,’ and I was certain that my life was not at all important. But her writing, so beautiful and clear and specific, was about my world.” And Lady Bird is even more so.
