2 Mother-Daughter Stories, but Only 1 is Celebrated. Why?

When you recognize where a story is headed, you usually feel disappointed or comforted by the familiar. The tropes and stock characters have robbed the story of its ability to surprise you. That’s always a threat with a genre so well worn as the coming-of-age film — the probably nostalgic tale of a child or teenager inching toward adulthood. Yet entries like Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird” still prove that this type of movie has the ability to move us.

Could stories that are so familiar to many a misfit be too similar to each other? In the weeks leading up to the Oscars, discussion has been swirling around “Lady Bird,” a best picture nominee, and whether it copied elements from Patricia Cardoso’s 2002 movie, “Real Women Have Curves.” Josefina López, the film’s screenwriter, told Hoy Los Angeles that “Lady Bird” was a “white version” of her movie. “I enjoyed it and at moments kept thinking: ‘Wow, the mother is like the mother in my movie. Wow, they aren’t going to let her go to college, like Ana,'” she said. Other commentators also noted the similarities but used harsher terms like plagiarism or whitewashing.

On the surface, the two young women in these movies do share many similarities. Ana (America Ferrera) and the self-christened Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) each attend a good school in California with classmates who are financially better off. Both have their hearts set on a college in New York and share excruciatingly difficult relationships with their mothers, whom they’ll part with either just before or at an airport.

For me, the similarities end there. Ana is a fantastic Mexican-American student who gets guidance from a teacher (George Lopez) on how to apply to Columbia University. She doesn’t seem to have friends at Beverly Hills High School, apart from the boy she likes, or in her neighborhood in East Los Angeles. Her story plays out over the last day of senior year and throughout the summer. She spends as much of her screen time working at her sister’s dress shop as she does at home. Her family is working class, with no money to send her to college at all or keep her sister’s store afloat.

Ana’s mother, Carmen (the formidable Lupe Ontiveros), forbids her to go to college because she needs her to work for her sister. Carmen undercuts Ana’s intelligence and needles her about her weight. When Ana stands up to her criticism, it becomes a body positive moment and a declaration of self-assurance. “Real Women Have Curves” ends on a hopeful note.

Lady Bird, whose ethnicity isn’t specified, deals with different problems in her family. Her mother (Laurie Metcalf with a nuanced performance) guilt-trips her about money and how she treats her father when he’s suffering from depression and has been laid off from his job. They’re a lower-middle-class family who own a home in Sacramento. Her journey isn’t as solo as Ana’s: She has a best friend at school to confide in and a counselor who steers her creative energies toward a performing arts class.

Her father helps her with the college application process, and she’s not the first in her family to go to college. She’s expected to go to college, preferably to a closer school with in-state tuition rates. The movie covers Lady Bird’s entire senior year so that she has time for not just one heartbreak, but two. The final moments of “Lady Bird” are more sobering. Once in New York, she overcomes her hatred of her hometown and the mother she fought so hard to escape.

Troubled mother-daughter relationships are not an uncommon theme in female coming-of-age stories. In movies, defying parents has long been a way of asserting one’s independence from them — no matter whether it’s in the headstrong girl’s interest. In “Imitation of Life” (1959), a light-skinned daughter separates herself from her black mother in order to pass as white, even as it breaks her mother’s heart. The unlikable Veda in “Mildred Pierce” (1945) seems born to defy her self-sacrificing mother. Remembering their relationships with their mothers, the characters of “The Joy Luck Club” (1993) also remember the times they fought against their mothers’ wishes that they become chess champions or concert pianists. More recently, the young lesbian at the center of “Pariah” (2011) has a fraught relationship with her mother that deteriorates as she tries to assert her sexuality.

Fast forward to “Lady Bird,” which has been celebrated by critics and rewarded with five Academy Award nominations. “Real Women” didn’t receive a single nod from the academy, though it won a handful of awards in the run-up to Oscars. That might look as if the industry were praising the movie with the white protagonist when it ignored the movie with a Latino one — that “Real Women Have Curves” lacked the familiarity the traditionally white, older Oscar voters would reward. If there was an unfair dismissal of “Real Women Have Curves,” it isn’t the fault of “Lady Bird.” There are more systemic barriers to blame. If anything, this should be a time to re-evaluate how the entertainment industry missed a remarkable movie like “Real Women Have Curves.” For me, watching the two onscreen mothers discourage their daughters from college rang true. When I was applying to colleges years ago from a corner of swampy Florida, my mother wouldn’t allow me to apply to any school in the state of New York. Although she drove me from cheerleading practice or guitar class to night courses at the local community college, she thought the city — and therefore the state — was too dangerous for me to live in alone. Her reasoning was different from the movie mothers, but I still remember responding like Ana and Lady Bird, upset at being barred from something I wanted.

I see myself in both Ana and Lady Bird. Like Ana, I studied hard in school and wanted to go to a good college. I’m close to my family who still wishes I would work closer to home. Like Lady Bird, I wanted to get as far away as I could from my hometown. I dreamed about movie theaters that weren’t giant multiplexes, museums that had more than a handful of rooms or a city with more places to spend time in other than a mall.

I’m uncomfortable with the idea that fights with your parents or tough mother figures can belong to only one story. We erase the cultural, economic and geographic complexities between these movies when we say that. Both of these movies should be enjoyed, especially since we don’t have enough coming-of-age stories about girls. We should play as many of these movies as possible: We have a lot of on-screen growing up to watch.