Sacramento is sprawling yet confined, natural yet metropolitan. If you round the corner of a busy, sun-drenched downtown street, you might suddenly discover yourself buried under the shade of trees that stretch up to the skies and merge, as if a forest appeared in the city’s center one afternoon. Drive along its residential streets, and you’ll notice that houses exist outside of time. Stately, white colonials are on one block, while modest Spanish revivals sit on the next. For all that has been said about the dreammaking happening in Los Angeles, the city itself is far less romantic. On the other hand, Sacramento is the kind of town where you leave your heart without even realizing it.
Artists have been trying to capture Sacramento’s strange, electric majesty for years. Joan Didion’s 2003 memoir “Where I Was From” does this with a generous realism. But the city played a part throughout all of her major works, popping up in wistful anecdotes about how she learned to swim in the town’s rivers and how she both valued and contended with how her perception of the city had changed since she was a child. In 2005's “The Year of Magical Thinking,” she wrote about how memories of high school dances at Christmas comforted her during a rare but intense moment of panic following the deaths of her only daughter and husband. And then there's Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut “Lady Bird,” an all-out love letter to Sacramento that opens with a Didion quote and acknowledges just how restricting it can feel to be stuck halfway between a big city and a small town.
