If you’ve seen Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut Lady Bird and you’re gay, you probably loved it. You may have gay gasped. (So did critics. It’s the most well-reviewed movie of all time on Rotten Tomatoes.) The film, which is great, seems manufactured by a Gay Twitter focus group. It’s written and directed by critically adored, but commercially underappreciated, queer darling Greta Gerwig. It stars critically adored, underutilized and due-for-awards-attention Roseanne alumna Laurie Metcalf. And its protagonist, played by Saoirse Ronan, is an outcast theatre nerd exponentially cooler than everyone around her who nevertheless dulls her shine to kowtow to her peers. She is us. We are her.
In being filled to the brim with white women to like, retweet and stan, the film has enchanted its audience. Over Thanksgiving weekend, plenty of gay men tweeted about seeing the film with their mothers, or with their Judys, or alone. Yet although Lady Bird boasts Gerwig’s strong directorial choices, writing and acting to its credit, there’s no denying that the film’s whiteness is part of its appeal. It’s set in Sacramento in 2003: People of color are few and far between in this setting.
Sitting through Lady Bird, I couldn’t help but feel like I had seen this story before. Of course, there are only two real plots in all of fiction: person goes on a journey, or stranger comes to town. But, so many of the plot points in Lady Bird’s quotidian bildungsroman echo, beat for beat, plot points from the 2002 film Real Women Have Curves.
Curves doesn’t get quite the reputation it deserves. It doesn’t get cited like it should, though, at the time, it did something for Latinas — and women, in general — akin to what Bridesmaids did with a cast of white women later. It declared that Latinx women in Hollywood were able to tell their own stories, to be funny and heartbreaking.
The films share a remarkable list of similar elements. Curves stars America Ferrera as Ana Garcia, a high school senior in California (like Lady Bird’s titular protagonist) who, as Lady Bird herself would say, is “from the wrong side of the tracks.” While Lady Bird is poor in Sacramento, Ana is poor in East Los Angeles. Like Ronan in Lady Bird, Ana meets a rich white boy who ignites her budding sexuality. Both protagonists struggle to convince their families to allow them to attend college in New York. Both have bodily trauma: Lady Bird breaks her arm, while Ana struggles with her weight. Both movies explore the fragile relationship between a headstrong daughter and a tough-as-nails working mom.
Why then has Real Women Have Curves seemed to have evaporated from public consciousness? Why then can we see ourselves in outcasts like Lady Bird, but not an outcast like Ana Garcia? Some might argue that the film’s age — it turned 15 this year — plays a factor. But in a world where people on Twitter can dig up every Laura Dern performance from the 1990s as a sign of latent genius, I don’t think that 2002 is that long ago.