Little women outshone by heart-throb Chalamet
Little Women
U cert, 135 min
★★★★★
Dir Greta Gerwig
Starring Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, James Norton, Tracy Letts
It would be near-impossible to love Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women more than Greta Gerwig does. This coming-of-age saga set in 19th-century New England was the writer-director’s favourite childhood novel, as it has been for generations of girls before her.
Gerwig’s film, led by Saoirse Ronan as Jo, the second-oldest and most independent of Alcott’s four March sisters, picks up the baton of previous adaptations with a due reverence that upstages its softly millennial sensibility.
Her boldest gambit is to split the story over two parallel time frames. Alcott published it across two volumes, in 1868-9, separated by a three-year hiatus in the lives of the genteel but impoverished March sisters. Here, we go back and forth – a decision that creates some rhythm problems before it starts to pay off.
The youngest sister, Amy, is played at both points by Florence Pugh. She can’t, in all honesty, look 12, but gives Amy an air of babyishness, shading into a more adult selfishness, that glues the role back together.
Emma Watson, supplying her usual finished charm, has no challenge lending consistency to dutiful-but-dull Meg, the eldest; and Eliza Scanlen gives a pale vulnerability to sickly piano prodigy Beth, “the best of us”. These stay-at-homes feel somewhat neglected, as does their charity-occupied mother, Marmee (a gracious Laura Dern). But it’s understandable that Jo’s bursting literary ambition, and Amy’s reckless escapades, and their competition for rich neighbour Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) should energise Gerwig’s attention more than anything else.
Jo feels fresh because of the career ambition. Gerwig reads her as Alcott, all the way. But Chalamet is the director’s secret weapon. Even Alcott agreed that Laurie was an underwritten suitor in the book: here he’s the liveliest character on screen, all jaunty mischief, japes in the snow, and a kind of junior-byronic tendency to brood and mope.
Gerwig has given us a Little Women that’s lightly disappointing in a few basic ways – Alexandre Desplat’s overbusy score is altogether too much of a not-great thing, and the everfluctuating haircuts are a distraction. It’s a full-marks-for-effort experience, and the hard work Gerwig has put in strikes deepening chords with the material as it goes. In tune with the March sisterhood, her film gradually figures out what it yearns to be.
Little Women goes on general release on Dec 27