Lady Bird, which hit theaters earlier this month, has collected sterling reviews proclaiming its writer- director, Greta Gerwig, an important new voice in American movies. Yet Gerwig isn’t really a new voice at all—in the past decade she’s racked up ten screenwriting credits, including collaborations with Chicago indie Joe Swanberg (Hannah Takes the Stairs and Nights and Weekends) and New York indie Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha and Mistress America). When I saw Lady Bird, her first solo flight, it struck me as something completely fresh, though I knew I’d already seen several movies she’d cowritten. Intrigued, I began revisiting some of these older features to see if I could extract the special sensibility of Lady Bird from the stories Gerwig had written with her mentors. Though autobiographical elements pop up in many of her scripts, the collaborations lack the sort of generosity and understanding she brings to her solo debut. One can isolate her voice, but often there seems to be someone else talking over her.
Nights and Weekends shows Gerwig to much better advantage. One of Swanberg’s best features, the movie unspools as a series of intimate conversations between young lovers James and Mattie, trying to maintain, and later restart, a long-distance romance between Chicago and New York. Gerwig takes command of nearly every scene, imprinting the story with her offbeat sense of humor. After the lovers, enjoying themselves at an arcade, watch an injection-molding machine form and dispense a little plastic lion, Mattie cracks, “And that’s how babies are made!” As their relationship deteriorates, she offhandedly asks James, “Do you ever wonder what story you’re gonna be in someone else’s life?” Hannah may have established Gerwig’s screen persona as an indie “it” girl, but Nights and Weekends refines that image into one of stubborn independence: in one scene Mattie exults in the fact that she has no lab partner in her science class, and when James asks if he can be her lab partner, she replies, “Absolutely not!”
Directed by Greta Gerwig
