Before she was a four-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker, Greta Gerwig was an accomplished actor, an indie darling who made the leap from mumblecore to mainstream with memorable parts in the likes of Greenberg, Maggie’s Plan and 20th Century Women. On screen, she’s a live wire – dazzling, endlessly unpredictable – but it’s her work behind the camera, both as a writer and director, which feels era defining.
Acutely observant and frequently hilarious, she has a knack for creating female characters who are thrillingly awkward and staunchly individual – women who, in anyone else’s hands could be reduced to daffy manic pixie dream girls, but in hers are achingly real, their eccentricities woven together with pain, longing, regret, jealousies and plenty of personal ambition. The result is a filmography like no other, one which combines the smallest arthouse offerings with the biggest blockbusters and still, somehow, manages to feel cohesive.
As Gerwig arrives at the Cannes Film Festival to serve in the prestigious role of jury president, following in the footsteps of Jane Campion, Spike Lee, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, we revisit her very best films to date.
Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007)
In this mumblecore classic helmed by Joe Swanberg, a bleached blonde, tousled haired Gerwig – who co-wrote the largely improvised script with the director, and co-star Kent Osborne – embodies the titular heroine, an aimless recent college graduate who drifts from one relationship to another, chronically unable to decide what she actually wants. The rambling dialogue is classic Gerwig – side-splittingly funny, neurotic, painfully awkward and oddly insightful – and as an introduction to her experimental, low-budget roots, there’s nothing better.
Nights and Weekends (2008)
A long-distance relationship fractures, repairs itself and then unravels again in this raw and touchingly intimate drama, which marks Gerwig’s feature debut, co-directed with Swanberg. The pair, who star in the film, collaborated on the script, too, sketching out a love story that feels almost uncomfortably real in its bursts of desire, frustrated compromises, bubbling anxieties and deep-seated sorrow. Oh, and there are big laughs too, demonstrating Gerwig’s eye for tragicomedy, something which permeates nearly all of her work.
Frances Ha (2012)
Surely one of the most swooningly beautiful films ever made about female friendship, Noah Baumbach’s luminous black-and-white crowd pleaser features some of Gerwig’s best writing (she co-authored the screenplay alongside the director) and one of her most charming performances in the part of Frances Halladay, a dancer who finds herself in the throes of a quarter life crisis when her codependent best friend and flatmate, Sophie (Mickey Sumner), leaves her to move from Brooklyn to Tribeca. Every single sequence is exquisite, from the shots of Frances sprinting haphazardly down the streets of New York to her ill-fated solo trip to Paris and that divine, drunken monologue about what she wants most in a relationship, a kind of mutual contentment which she eventually finds in her platonic bond with Sophie.
Mistress America (2015)
Gerwig’s “pretend rewind” scene sums it up pretty perfectly – Noah Baumbach’s fizzy screwball comedy, again co-written with his future wife, is silly, hysterically funny and, in parts, deeply relatable. A portrait of millennial malaise as experienced by a college freshman (Lola Kirke) and her flighty, spacey soon-to-be-stepsister (Gerwig), it sees the duo head off on a madcap adventure to Connecticut to confront the latter’s nemesis via a grizzled psychic and much soul searching. Both Gerwig and her pen are at their sharpest here, skewering the self-obsession of vapid, unfocused young adults with visible glee.
Lady Bird (2017)
Her solo directorial debut, the delightful tale of Saoirse Ronan’s raging red-headed high schooler who constantly battles with her mum (Laurie Metcalf), falls out with her best friend (Beanie Feldstein), falls for two equally unsuitable love interests (Lucas Hedges and Timothée Chalamet) and, in one early scene, literally falls out of a car, functions as something of a manifesto and origin story for Gerwig – the coming-of-age of a restless teen growing up in Sacramento in the early 2000s (as the filmmaker herself did) and yearning to be in a big city before finally coming to appreciate everything she was about to leave behind. Frame by frame, it’s a near perfect film, directed with a precision and sensitivity which belied the then-34-year-old’s relative inexperience and netted her two Oscar nods (for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay) to boot.
Little Women (2019)
Every generation gets the Little Women adaptation they deserve and I would (perhaps controversially) argue that this glorious, sun-dappled take on the Louisa May Alcott classic is the best yet – a retelling which actually justifies its existence by switching up its structure, zipping back and forth between the more sombre present and the joyous, carefree past. It’s a choice that reinvigorates the source material, helping us to see the stroppy Amy (an extraordinary Florence Pugh) in an entirely new light, reframing the relationship between Jo and Laurie (an excellent Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet) as doomed from the very beginning, and bringing a new focus to Jo’s working life in New York alongside the dashing Professor Bhaer (Louis Garrel).
It also brings the film its most poignant moment – the juxtaposed timelines which show Beth’s (Eliza Scanlen) recovery and the girls’ reunion with their father (Bob Odenkirk), and then her passing immediately afterwards – which had me, like everyone else in the cinema, weeping uncontrollably. And that’s to say nothing of the wonderful dynamism that comes from the overlapping dialogue, Jo’s heartbreaking monologue about women’s roles in society, or that goosebump-inducing ending. It’s simply a masterstroke, both in terms of writing and directing, and earned Gerwig a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nomination.
Barbie (2023)
The pastel pink billion-dollar blockbuster which saved cinemas in the wake of the pandemic might seem like a step in a new, glossier, more mainstream direction for the filmmaker – and it is, but just watch that scene where Margot Robbie’s perfectly groomed, vacantly grinning plastic doll stops shimmying to Dua Lipa’s “Dance The Night” to ask her friends if they ever think about dying, and you’ll realise that she is, in fact, a classic Greta Gerwig heroine. Awkward, conflicted, and peppy but with a depressive streak, she sets off on a voyage of self discovery, one which defined culture, secured the director another Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nod, and established her as a Hollywood power player whose future looks immeasurably bright.