Greta Gerwig, our most fearless filmmaker

The three films Greta Gerwig has made since adding writer/director to her stellar resume six years ago are ‘Lady Bird’, ‘Little Women’ and now ‘Barbie’.

Each addresses a different vision of womanhood – from rebellious youth to struggling sisters to a searching commercial icon – but they share a universal theme of female agency.

As both an actor and filmmaker, California-born Gerwig is drawn to stories about women who are the strong center of the storms that surround them.

“I hope I never make a film that fails the Bechdel test,” Gerwig once told me in an interview. (American cartoonist Alison Bechdel devised the test: to pass, a film must feature at least two women talking to each other about something other than a man.)

After more than a decade as a popular actor, mostly in male-directed films, Gerwig hit the stratosphere with “Lady Bird,” her first flight as a solo writer/director and my choice as the best film of 2017. She received two Oscar nominations : Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. (Her first two feature films, “Lady Bird” and “Little Women,” received a total of 11 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.)

The comedy star of “Frances Ha” and “Mistress America,” who turns 40 on Aug. 4, found the perfect avatar in Saoirse Ronan for “Lady Bird’s” title rebel, a story inspired by Gerwig’s own Catholic schoolgirl upbringing in Sacramento. Always wary of rules, Ronan’s Lady Bird brazenly chooses Stephen Sondheim’s “Everybody Says Don’t” as her audition song for a high school musical.

“Little Women” followed in 2019. Gerwig made her mark on Louisa May Alcott’s classic story of four sisters – Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy March – who grew up in New England and forged their identities during the American Civil War. The film earned Gerwig her third Oscar nomination, for Best Adapted Screenplay.

In the film, Gerwig dramatically alters Alcott’s timelines, emphasizing the March sisters as adults. The intention is to show them not as girls but as women, after they have discovered more about themselves. Saoirse Ronan plays aspiring writer Jo, who is determined not to spend her life trying to find a man: “I intend to make my own way in the world.”

Jo’s feelings are echoed in the journey of Margot Robbie’s title character in “Barbie,” out July 21. The well-known doll from childhood dress-up games magically transforms into a human and leaves her plastic fantasy behind to discover the challenges of the real world. . She is joined on her journey by uninvited friend Ken (Ryan Gosling), but it is Barbie who drives the pink getaway car.

Gerwig co-wrote the screenplay with fellow filmmaker Noah Baumbach, her life partner and frequent collaborator. She calls the film and its diverse cast “humanistic” in its approach to self-actualization.

There are record-scratch moments of clarity in “Barbie.” In one, all the beautiful people together in a brightly colored disco wave to Dua Lipa’s ‘Dance the Night’, congratulating each other for living such fabulous lives. Then Margot’s Barbie, becoming aware of real life beyond plastic Barbie Land, stops the music and abruptly asks, “Do you guys ever think about dying?”

She questions the superficiality of her existence, something Gerwig’s title character in “Frances Ha” struggles with when she yells, “Don’t treat me like a three-hour brunch friend!” at an acquaintance.

“This line came up, I think, because it’s really about the people who you can give very cursory or ‘non-profound’ answers to and they’ll just accept it and just move on…” Gerwig said of that movie 2013 .

“We just accept it, and that to me is someone you see for brunch and you talk about your life, but you don’t have to offer them anything. Like a Facebook friend you occasionally eat with.”

Gerwig’s protagonists, those she plays and those she writes, all seem to be in a whirlwind of social stress and change. But Gerwig has always thrived on chaos.

You can see it in her grand arrival scene in the 2015 screwball comedy “Mistress America.” Gerwig’s character, Brooke, walks down a red staircase in New York’s Times Square to greet a newcomer to town. Arms outstretched, her smile a mile wide, she glides through a jostling crowd of people.

Nothing seems to bother Gerwig. When she flew to Toronto in the fall of 2017 to promote “Lady Bird,” bad weather stranded her at the Washington, DC airport.

There was no way she would go to Toronto to do Q&A at a public preview that night. She bought herself a pizza, found a quiet corner of the airport and took out her smartphone. She then made a video of her conducting her own witty Q&A, which she emailed to her reps in Toronto to play during the screening.

It’s been quite the Hollywood climb for Gerwig, who originally wanted to be a playwright, not a filmmaker. But she was unable to attend any of the playwriting graduate programs she had applied for.

“If theater was my first love, then cinema was my adult love,” she told me in an interview.

“But it wasn’t something I thought I could have a career in because it just seemed so unlikely that I could. I was writing and making things all the time, and acting in other people’s things and film felt like it was kind of the Wild West… it all seemed like someone was going to call me and say, ‘Okay, now you have to to find a real job.”

“But as I learned more and more and grew into it, I just became certain that what I wanted to do was write and direct.”

Star Contributor Peter Howell is a film critic based in Toronto. Follow on Twitter: @peterhowellfilm

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