Greta Gerwig’s Little Women is a holiday treat
Director Gerwig puts new spin on Little Women without burying it under modern expectations
How did Louisa May Alcott know, 20 years ago before the invention of cinema, that she was writing the template for the first Christmas movie? I don’t mean a tale set at Christmas, though Little Women does feature pivotal moments that take place at holiday time. And there are plenty of wintry scenes: New England at the end of the Little Ice Age.
It’s more about the combination of family and familiarity, cosiness and music and fancy dress that speaks to the season. The last big adaptation of Alcott’s novel, in 1994 and starring Winona Ryder as Jo March, came out at yuletide. Even the 1933 version with Katharine Hepburn opened at the end of November.
Director Greta Gerwig’s generational new take — she’d have been just 11 in the winter of ’94 — puts a contemporary spin on the story without burying it under the weight of modern expectations. The March sisters — writer Jo (Saoirse Ronan), sensible Meg (Emma Watson), self-absorbed Amy (Florence Pugh) and sickly Beth (Eliza Scanlen) — can be headstrong and wild, but they are also part of the straitlaced and corseted world into which they were born.
Fortunately, they have the attentions of their wealthy maiden aunt (Meryl Streep), who drills into the girls the necessity of a proper marriage and the stability it brings. Equally as fortunate is how often her advice is ignored. “It’s possible to be right and foolish,” she says of their father, in one of her I’m-getting-the-last-word moments. And of herself: “I may not always be right, but I’m never wrong.”
The film opens, rather confusingly, midway through the story it is telling, with Beth still at home, Meg married to John Brooke (James Norton) and Amy in Europe as a companion to Aunt March. Here she runs into Laurie (Timothée Chalamet), an old family friend Jo has recently turned down in his offer of marriage.
We meet Jo in the opening scene in a New York publishing house, where a shrewd editor (Tracy Letts) is purchasing one of her stories, careful not to say he likes it too much. “We pay 25 to 30 for things of this sort,” he tells her. “We’ll pay 20 for that.” And as for future submissions:
“If the main character is a girl, make sure she’s married by the end. Or dead. Either way.”
The fractured timeline is the most puzzling choice Gerwig has made. After a recent screening, I spoke to several fans of the story who weren’t sure what to make of it. Indeed, there are cuts where the only way we know time has passed (or rolled back) is to note the length of someone’s hair, or try to catch whether they are yet married.
Perhaps the reason is that Gerwig, who wrote this adaptation, knows the source material backward and forward. A few subtitles beyond a singular “Seven years earlier” would have helped. But it’s hardly a deal-breaker: With a little patience one can easily orient oneself in the Marches’ march of time.
Chalamet’s character makes a good signpost, as the flirtatious and wealthy young man pinballs between one sister and another — dancing with Meg in one scene, posing for Amy in another, or tumbling into their childhood club, which comprises the sisters dressed as (male) politicians.
He’s accepted as a kind of honorary sibling, and you sense in him a love for the lot of them, and an eagerness to be swept up in the feminine energy that infuses their home. This seems a good time to mention that Laura Dern shines in the role of the matriarch, Marmee. She says little but makes her every word count, as when she tells Jo during a late-night talk: “There are some natures too noble to curb and too lofty to bend.”
Alcott didn’t write that, by the way. It comes from a letter her own mother wrote, referring to the author herself. It’s perfect that Marmee bestows it upon
Jo, just as it’s perfect when Meg explains her desire for a family; when Beth compares her ill health to a receding tide (that one is from the book); or when Amy lectures Laurie: “Don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition.”
It’s this kind of meta-attention to detail from the filmmaker, combined with a clear and deep affection for the characters, that makes Little Women such a treat and a joy. Of course it opens on Christmas Day. It’s a gift.