It is with a juvenile excitement belying her 22 years of age that Saoirse shuffles from foot to foot in a convenience store in the latter half of Lady Bird. “It’s my birthday today,” she insists on telling the cashier, “which is why all these things. I can buy them.” She perfectly encapsulates the newly 18-year-old drunk on the power of being able to buy scratchcards and cigarettes, even if they don’t necessarily like them. Her turn as Lady Bird – whose birth name is Christine – is so believably earnest. Her longing and boredom seep through the screen as Ronan rolls out of a moving car to avoid an argument with her mother, stands in the middle of the pavement to shriek after her first kiss and lies that one of the huge houses close to the school is hers.
Lady Bird is so effective as a film about teenage girls, mothers and daughters because it feels so lived. The characters have arguments that we can remember having – Lady Bird is snippy as she shops for prom dresses because she feels strange wearing them. She tries out for school musicals and buys forbidden things at the grocery store and wants to be interesting so badly that she changes the way she is and regrets it later.
Compare this performance to what we have seen so far in her upcoming film The Outrun, the trailer of which includes a poignant line spoken by Saoirse: “There is only so much height any wave can sustain before it comes crashing down.”
Based on a 2016 memoir by Amy Liptrot, the film follows 29-year-old Rona as she leaves her life in London and treatment for alcohol abuse and returns home to Orkney. Although lonely, she takes solace in the wildness of the sea and land, trying to heal from the events that led to her situation and addiction. This may seem like heavy subject matter compared to that of Ronan’s other well-known works – she is perhaps best known in recent years for her performances in coming-of-age films such as Little Women (2019) and Lady Bird (2017), both directed by Greta Gerwig.
Saoirse Ronan is no stranger to contrast when it comes to her films. For the last ten years or so of her career, she has repeatedly juxtaposed the fiery adolescent and the established young woman, starring in Brooklyn and then Lady Bird, On Chesil Beach and then Little Women. To continue her pattern of alternating coming-of-age and historical pieces, after The Outrun Ronan is also set to star in Blitz, set in the heart of the Second World War, which premieres on 9 October at London Film Festival. While every actor has to display an element of range, it is the contrast between these two specific genres that is so fascinating about her career.
The thing that Ronan brings to all of these, that ties them together, is her ability to smoothly depict a character undergoing a great transformation throughout the course of the film. Rona’s hair, dyed a bright and brilliant blue during her time in London, slowly grows out to its natural colour as she returns to the islands and to herself. Lady Bird, wearing a name she gave to herself in rejection of the one her parents chose for her, grows more assured that she needn’t force herself to be more interesting and begins once more to introduce herself as Christine. Jo March comes to see that her sisters’ dreams are as valid as her own and sees her novel published.
Ronan has clearly settled into her ability to play older characters, but many of her best-known performances now are within these coming-of-age pieces. In them she plays the uncertain and the fiery, those who have not yet found their place in the world. Even in The Outrun she plays somebody who has lost her place in the world, now finding it once again. Perhaps it is surprising that this works time and time again – for years there have been grumblings within the film and television industries about teenage characters being cast as adults and feeling unconvincing. Not when it comes to Ronan. The reason for this lies, perhaps, in how many of us first met her: in her debut as a child actress.
Saoirse Ronan’s film debut occurred in 2007, when she was only eleven years old. The film in question was I Could Never Be Your Woman, in which she plays the protagonist’s daughter, Izzie, a girl crushing on a boy in her class and vying to win him over. In the same year she played Briony in Atonement, an infatuated teenage girl who makes a vital mistake that gets the wrong man convicted of a crime – the role to score her an Academy Award nomination at just twelve. Ronan has now garnered four such nominations, all before thirty – the first for Best Supporting Actress and the subsequent three for Best Actress.
A role lesser known than her Atonement breakout, perhaps, is also her first lead role – as the spirited Lina Mayfleet in the 2008 sci-fi adventure flick City of Ember. Compared with her previous roles, Lina is one of the characters with the most agency and drive in the film’s story – it is up to her, along with a classmate, to rescue their community from the deteriorating underground city they have been sheltering in after a global disaster. Lively and determined, through Lina Saoirse could display all the desirable qualities of a protagonist and a character actor. Despite the film’s mixed reception, even negative reviews could agree on one thing – whatever their thoughts on the worldbuilding and story, Ronan’s performance was the strongest element. She was branded by Cinemablend as a “fantastic heroine” even in a poor review.
Little surprise, then, that after this lead role came another – Susie Salmon in The Lovely Bones. This was a much darker film, certainly, with Ronan playing a murdered girl watching over her loved ones. Even in this role, though, she is not passive. Though she is confined to the afterlife she endures her own conflict as to whether she should try to reveal her killer to her family. A dead girl is played as still being full of life, owing to the vibrance of Ronan’s performance.
The number of iconic roles she has been known for from an early age could, perhaps, contribute to her popularity for these coming-of-age films – it is easy to believe that Ronan still inhabits these years when we have seen her come of age on the big screen all this time. Ever since her onscreen debut we have seen her develop as an actor, trying out a range of roles from Mary Queen of Scots to a teenage assassin. Every time we see her explore this theme of finding one’s own voice it feels realistic because we have seen it before and watched her triumph.
Saoirse Ronan was described, by an interviewer for Time Out in 2013, as “the most teenage teenage actress” they had ever met, buying Urban Outfitters bomber jackets, wearing Doc Martens and remaining close with her parents, who had accompanied her to the set of every one of her films until she was old enough to be unattended. “Child stars are not meant to grow up normal,” the interviewer noted, “they’re meant to grow up wild like weeds, into tangled messes. Not this child star.”
Perhaps it is in part the supportive and safe environment Ronan had as a teen actor which allows her to thrive within the coming-of-age genre today – it is easier, surely, to be in touch with those years of her life when her family worked for her to have something approaching normality within them. Surely more actors should be allowed the space to have these typical coming-of-age experiences for herself, rather than being as isolated and idolised as many child stars in the industry are made to be. Ronan’s coming-of-age films such as Lady Bird feel sincere and human because her own experiences, it seems, have been too.
As compelling as Ronan’s more emotionally fraught performances are, her dry assuredness means that one of her most enjoyable roles in recent years has been in the 2022 whodunnit film See How They Run – will she extend her remarkable range to some more comedy next?
The post Saoirse Ronan’s constant coming of age appeared first on Little White Lies.
0 Comments