Influence in the Decade: Greta Gerwig Turns the Indie into the Iconic
“Did you feel emotional the first time that you drove in Sacramento?”
To mark the end of the decade, I will certainly be having some lists (I love lists), but I am also writing five cultural essays in October about some of the major movers and shakers in pop culture from the past ten years. I wrote about Michael Schur already and I wanted to write about Greta Gerwig. Partly because of her immense talent as one of the decade’s top filmmakers with just one film under her belt. And partly because her second film of the 2010s, Little Women, comes out on Christmas Day in 2019. This means I probably won’t get a chance to see it before the decade is over and my list of my favorite movies of the decade is published. There are lots of movies like this (Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Just Mercy, 1917, A Hidden Life), but Little Women is the one I’ll regret leaving out the most from the list, if it does meet my sky-high expectations. To atone for that, I am dedicating Gerwig this entire piece.
Gerwig has had a more unconventional career than most, acting in movies since 2006, but never really becoming a big star into she took to behind-the-scenes roles. Her most commercial role to date is probably in No Strings Attached, the rom-com with Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman, in which she plays Patrice, the “friend” of the movie. (She’s also the best part of the movie by a wide margin. Not a surprise.)
With a 2011 release date, No Strings Attached is definitely part of Gerwig’s story over the last ten years, but I think her more noteworthy acting contributions come from the work she did with auteur filmmakers like Wes Anderson in 2018’s Isle of Dogs, Mike Mills in 2016’s 20th Century Women, Pablo Larrain in 2016’s Jackie, and Noah Baumbach in 2010’s Greenberg. Of course, she also happens to be married to Baumbach and served as a co-writer of Frances Ha and Mistress America with him. She also co-wrote Northern Comfort and is, in my opinion, the strongest voice to emerge from the mumblecore scene.
(Side-note: I’m hoping for a Baumbach v. Gerwig battle at the Oscars next year with the former boasting Marriage Story and the latter taking a big swing with the aforementioned Little Women.)
Collaborations with Baumbach and people like Joe Swanberg were only the beginning for Gerwig. Every step she took in these behind-the-scenes roles clued her into a larger purpose for her creative vision. The most talented indie filmmaker of her generation took the genre and continued to toy with it, perfecting it to the point where the Indie Spirit Awards were great, but the Academy Awards were the true sticking point. She went from mumblecore darling to perennial Oscar heavyweight over the course of the decade, expanding her brand into an iconic realm where Lady Bird has become just as famous of a cinematic character as more-conventionally successful fare like Mark Watney of The Martian and Frances Ha herself.
Many indie characters are well-known among film lovers and throughout the history of low-budget productions. In the past decade, only Lady Bird, Gerwig’s 2017 directorial debut, took the indie and turned it into something iconic, creating a coming-of-age story that will last in the film landscape forever. Even when it came out, it was already a classic.
But Lady Bird would not have happened without Gerwig’s best filmmaking collaboration of the decade before Saoirse Ronan-in-high-school steamrolled into our cultural consciousness. She needed Frances Ha, which not only cemented herself as a great writer beyond improvisation, but also showed that she could create transcendent, flawed, down-to-earth characters. And she could act them, too.
So, yes, Gerwig has an inordinately strong career already, but I think it’s pretty undeniable that Frances Ha was her best star-turn. In an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Gerwig said,
“There’s a grace period where being a mess is charming and interesting and then I think when you hit around 27 it stops being charming and interesting, and it starts being kind of pathological, and you have to find a new way of life. Otherwise, you’re going to be in a place where the rest of your peers have been moving on, and you’re stuck.”
Gerwig could have stayed in the realm of Frances Ha and she would have likely garnered massive success for it. The whole movie is about as genuine of a character study as you’ll find in indie filmmaking, as it was not afraid to show a flawed character as truly flawed, rather than just misunderstood. And it really worked and resonated to the point where Gerwig would have flourished in that same sort of role. But she didn’t want to be stuck. She wanted to move on, just like her contemporaries did. And so it was that she turned Frances Ha (and her other work, too, albeit to a lesser extent) into one of the decade’s top films when she directed Lady Bird.
First of all, Lady Bird deserves points for the fact that introduced us to a brand-new and surely beloved director-actor muse-esque pairing with Gerwig and Saoirse Ronan. Ronan is teaming up with her new favorite director again for Little Women and hopefully their collaborations will prove fruitful for many decades to come. Damien Chazelle and Ryan Gosling, Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, David Fincher and Brad Pitt. None of these excite me as much as Gerwig and Ronan do.
They definitely bring out the best in each other and Ronan agrees. She told Indiewire’s Jude Dry, “When you meet someone that you instantly click with, when you know that person wants to do good work with you, it makes you take that leap of faith too.”
It’s not that Ronan never worked with a driven director before Gerwig, but it’s clear that they were both perfectly in tune and at the right moments in their respective careers and lives to do Lady Bird when they did it and it completely paid off. It’s weird to think of one of the most critically-acclaimed movies of 2017 and of the decade as being a “leap of faith,” but don’t all artistic projects start out that way? Don’t you need to take a leap of faith to put anything back into this world? Don’t you have to trust yourself?
Few directors have spoken about this as openly and as admirably as Gerwig has and I think it’s because of the position she found herself in when Lady Bird entered production. Yes, she had a big career up until Lady Bird, but all of her directorial hopes were sort of resting on that movie.
To understand this, we need to understand Hollywood’s culture of men failing upwards. Take Max Landis for example. Multiple sexual assault allegations. His four movies (Me Him Her, American Ultra, Mr. Right, and Victor Frankenstein) average a 41% on Rotten Tomatoes and they made an average of $21 million on an average budget of $25 million, plus more for marketing. Essentially, he made four bombs and created a hostile work environment every time. What happens to him? He gets three million dollars from Netflix to make Bright, another bomb.
But what about Patty Jenkins? She directs the Academy Award-nominated Monster in 2003 and it makes $60.4 million on a budget of $8 million dollars. What happens to her? She directs two episodes of Entourage and one episode of Arrested Development over the course of the next eight years. Then, it’s 2011. She receives an Emmy nomination for directing The Killing. And she gets snubbed by Marvel Studios on the production of Thor: The Dark World.
Finally, it’s 2017. It’s been fourteen years since Monster was a monster hit. And she is given the keys to DC’s Wonder Woman franchise. Not that this is the natural end point of success, but damn if Hollywood wants successful franchises, Jenkins was clearly a better candidate to helm one than Landis ever was.
And with Hollywood’s climate, she’s one of the lucky ones. It’s an awful environment and a toxic one, but it’s pervasive nonetheless and it has real bearing on the success of filmmakers. I like Will Ferrell, but there’s been, like, twelve Ferrell bombs in a row at the theaters. But I’m glad he’s given more chances because I know he can be funny.
I just have to hope the same can be true for someone like Tessa Thompson, who is absolutely amazing, but was in the lukewarmly-received Men in Black: International. Will Hollywood give up on her, but continue to find new roles for Chris Hemsworth? I hope not and I certainly hope a day comes when that’s not a genuine bit of curiosity anymore.
This is all a long way of saying that Gerwig had these ideas weighing on her mind when she was making Lady Bird, but she always trusted and believed in herself. It’s that amount of confidence that shone through in the movie. Gerwig had arrived and she wasn’t going to let anyone say otherwise. She said as much on a January 2018 episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast when Simmons asked her a question along those lines and she responded,
“I was just so sure that I was ready to be a director. I was like, even if this is a complete belly flop, I’ll make the next one. I’ll scrounge up some amount of money. I’ll figure out how to do it really small. I just at that point was like, ‘I don’t think anything’s gonna slow me down.’ So it was both: I need this to work, and also, even if it doesn’t, I’m gonna keep going.”
Fortunately, Lady Bird made almost eight times its budget at the box office, garnered a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes, and earned a Best Picture nomination, as well as an extremely-deserved Best Director nomination for Gerwig. And not once did she ever compromise her vision. She trusted herself and she created something iconic for the newly-transcendent indie genre and the world is better for having her art in it.
Many have been quick to label Lady Bird a nostalgic movie, but the setting was just a way for Gerwig to tell the most honest possible story about her own feelings towards these life-altering moments we all experience. She told Rolling Stone’s Esther Zuckerman,
“I felt like the truth of growing up in Sacramento in the 1990s and early 2000s, it was, unless you knew the guy at the record store who had the offbeat taste and the cool record collection, you wouldn’t know some of the things that I think everybody takes for granted today.”
This isn’t to say that “things were better before technology,” but rather it means that we have not yet entered a culture of connection. When you’re on the other side of the country, that means something different in 2019 than it did in 2002. Lady Bird shows that clearly.
Her belief is most palpably apparent when she wrote to some of her favorite musicians, including Dave Matthews and Justin Timberlake and sincerely implored them to allow their music to be used in her early 2000s period piece. It’s a great lesson for everyone who thinks herself an artist. Go after what you want and trust that you know how to make it good.
Because Lady Bird was good. It’s one of the best movies of the decade and now we get Greta Gerwig’s visions in our lives for a long time. “But I think so much of directing is continuing your instincts and honing those world building elements,” Gerwig says in a featurette for the movie. “It’s hard to break it down to one thing or another. But I would say I have walked away from the whole process mainly feeling like I can’t wait to do this again. Right away.”
The featurette is correct. Lady Bird is a triumph. Gerwig is one of the decade’s best directors after just one movie. And she is going to do it again with Little Women in December. To me, that counts as right away. But it’s also not soon enough.
