Little Women
Coming-of-Age Period Drama | 135 Minutes | 2019 | United States
(4/4)
Director: Greta Gerwig | Producers: Amy Pascal, Denise Di Novi, Robin Swicord | Screenplay: Greta Gerwig | Based on: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott | Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet, Meryl Streep, Tracy Letts, Bob Odenkirk, James Norton, Louis Garrel, Chris Cooper | Music: Alexandre Desplat | Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux | Editor: Nick Houy
Greta Gerwig imbues the seventh film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic coming-of-age novel with deft characterisation and heady momentum, across and finally through the screen. In her hands Little Women lives and breathes. Theatrical rather than conventionally cinematic, its sets are lavish but so consistent in their colour and decoration that they feel timely and suitably homely rather than deluxe. Each scene bustles with gesture and intonation even when its components aren’t rushing headlong through the streets of Manhattan, idling about the parks of Paris, or swirling the ballrooms and striding fields and beaches in the vicinity of Boston, Mass. (in fact even the New York and Parisian sequences in this iteration of Little Women were shot entirely in Massachusetts, the first film version of the novel to make extensive use of the Harvard and Concord locales which Alcott called home).
Yet for all of its style and dynamism, no doubt meticulously orchestrated to appear so eloquently spontaneous and scattershot, at the heart of this Little Women are relatively stolid portrayals of Jo, Meg, Beth, Amy, and co. They are practical, purposeful, not easy to ruffle. They grapple with circumstance and the restrictive status of women, at a time when Civil War looms someplace else in the United States. They hit all of the right notes and take all of life’s inevitable detours – Jo’s dalliance with Laurie, and her hair, sadly departed, and her quarrel with Amy who travels to Europe with their querulous aunt – but even amid heartache and tragedy their lungs fill steadily and there’s a surety of breath. Everything about this take is compelling. With all of the respect that is due to George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn, Gillian Armstrong and Winona Ryder, remarkably this Little Women graduates top of its class.
Inevitably this Little Women will be compared to previous renditions, especially the 1994 movie by Armstrong which still feels modern and whose characters remain writ large in the mind. There are more hits than misses when it comes to the cast. Crucially from the outset we utterly believe in Saoirse Ronan’s Jo, with her mixture of stridency and slight antsiness and ineffable warmth and vigour, and Meg and Beth, played by Emma Watson and Eliza Scanlen, are more full-bodied without losing their subtle contrasts. On the other hand Timothée Chalamet’s charisma is smouldering and sullen, not remotely outré. As Laurie he is no flop, but he does not possess the mischievousness bordering on roguishness which might make him a convincing match for Jo, nor the requisite dissoluteness that would make his subsequent marriage to Amy a sign of maturity and a real progression of character.
Florence Pugh as both the prepubescent and mature Amy is a gambit which doesn’t quite come off. It makes for an incongruous scene when she acts out at the schoolhouse, makes her burning of Jo’s manuscript seem spiteful rather than petulant, and as a result the character in Paris also lacks a little refinement and growth. Florence Pugh captures a certain hardness of character, and the movie is much stronger in showing Amy’s motivations, the admixture of ambition and pragmatism which makes her aspire to a successful marriage at the same time as it drives her art. This Amy lacks the temperamental glassiness which in the previous rendition sets her apart from her sisters, and instead even through outrages and fallings-out there’s a sort of slumpy bonhomie.
Bob Odenkirk at first seems laughably miscast opposite Laura Dern as the ostensible head of the March household, but the shabby idealism and genteel poverty of the character comes through and the casting makes more sense alongside his sister, Meryl Streep’s grotesquerie aunt. If there are missteps Pugh still gives a sterling performance, and none detract significantly from the atmosphere and cohesion of the film. More important is the brightness of Louis Garrel’s performance as Friedrich Bhaer, a contemporary take on the character in which the previously stilted foreign professor springs to life as youthful, dashing, engaging, and inquisitive, a physical and intellectual rather than purely ideological match for Jo. In general Gerwig’s is a more even-handed presentation. Beth isn’t saintly but shows her youth, and all the confusion and distress that inevitably tempers the acceptance of her sickness. The remaining sisters combat valiantly with work and duty, love and fate, and with the aspirations and realities that beset both romance and marriage.
Characters talk over one another and chatter echoes throughout the March house in yet another bravura display of unruliness and rhythm. The big formal innovation of this Little Women is in the way Gerwig nimbly and suggestively interweaves timelines, a contiguous past and a continuous present. The past catches up with the present and the present with the past, before they split apart at the close in rhapsodic snapshots of conciliation.
We start out not in Concord but in New York City, where Jo teaches at a boarding house to provide for her family back home while mustering courage as a fledgeling writer. The editor of the Weekly Volcano tells her to make her stories short and spicy, shorn of moralistic overtones, and by the end her heroines must be dead if not married. He accepts one story with plenty of cuts, saying ‘We pay twenty-five to thirty for things of this sort. We’ll pay twenty for that’, and Jo springs with excitement. New York serves as a reference point as Jo travels home to be with her dying sister, and as much as this version of Little Women brings new focus to Amy and Meg, emotionally the film circles these poles: Jo’s journey home, familial bonds and the enduring relationship with her sisters, at the same time as she implicitly rejects Laurie for Bhaer and embraces her destiny as a writer.
The interweaving of timelines, with all the right ellipses and stops, allows for several evocative juxtapositions: Jo’s skirt which is repeatedly scorched, along with Meg’s hair at Jo’s hands before they attend a party; the burning of Jo’s manuscripts, first by Amy then by Jo herself when she belatedly accepts Bhaer’s criticism and begins writing in earnest; and on two early morning trips downstairs to the kitchen, as Beth struggles in the throes of scarlet fever. Sometimes these evocations and callbacks stretch time, at others they blur together, as at the midway point of the film when a youthful day trip to the beach blends into a combative talk between two confiding sisters. Burgeoning adolescence burns with a golden glow and a palette of pinks and creams, crimsons and ochres, while the present is still suffused with light but a little bit blue and colder. The film’s piano-led score by Alexandre Desplat sustains while it lingers.
Meg’s wedding, preceded by Beth’s funeral and followed by Jo’s first rejection of Laurie, serves as another dividing line, the point at which the film’s timelines begin bleeding together. The overall approach brings out some of the reflexivity of Alcott’s novel, whose heroine Jo – broadly based on Alcott, whose family bore poorer circumstances – attains creative fulfillment writing what is effectively a version of Little Women. In one surprising aside, Marmee March, played attentively by Laura Dern, reveals that she is not patient by nature and feels angry almost every day. Less matronly, Dern’s portrayal emphasises mutual respect beyond parental guidance, and scenes with Marmee and Jo crackle with shared wisdom and similar instincts. Little Women also fleshes out the neighbour, Mr. Laurence, played here by Chris Cooper, dwelling on the loneliness of his house and forging a touching connection between he and Beth based on memories of his own daughter, who died young. Little Women teases and flutters then catches hold of its ending, turning the page and trimming the leather though its contents remain fiercely unbound.
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