Gerwig’s “Little Women” steps lively
Even before the dancing starts, there’s something about the way she runs.
Near the beginning of “Little Women,” Saoirse Ronan takes off. Cutting her way through a soberly dressed crowd, she flies across the pavement — blond waves bouncing — her face lit from within by a private smile. Her flapping coat makes it look as though she’s soaring on wings. She’s both of the earth and air; grounded yet light.
The reason Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” is so fresh and so piercingly alive? Its dancing spirit, in which even a run is a choreographic act.
In this adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel about four sisters growing up in New England during and after the Civil War, Ronan, as the willful Jo, has physical prowess:
She’s sharp, she’s spontaneous and she’s more than a little bit wild.
As the close-knit March sisters — Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy — glide and tumble their way through the story, Gerwig orchestrates a kind of choreography that is as much physical as verbal. The actors have a way of bursting through space — and piling on one another, both in love and in anger — so that you’re able to feel their three-dimensional fullness. What Gerwig cultivates visually is choreographic pandemonium: restless, energetic and a hair shy of fullblown chaos.
And she makes spaces for actual dances — short, though never slight, gems — that were created by contemporary choreographer Monica Bill Barnes. Flannery Gregg, a member of her company, is the associate choreographer.
Whether obvious or not, dance and its inherent musicality provide subtext for everything in “Little Women” — even the approach to dialogue. In an episode of IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Gerwig spoke about how she used slash marks to indicate when the next character would enter with a line so she could create the right speed and cadence. She described it as a technique for the actors to master. “It’s like being a dancer,” she said. “You find the freedom in the structure.”
It’s the same with a film that dances: Gerwig’s clear cinematic frame allows her to take risks with her approach to movement and to show something of a character’s inner world. When we first see Laurie, played by Timothée Chalamet,
he is captured in a slow-motion walk that makes it seem as if he were drifting over water.
Chalamet’s Laurie, especially in the film’s first half, is something of a sprite. He has a loose silkiness, which makes his control — evident in his ability to balance and turn — so bewitching, especially the way it contrasts with Ronan’s rough-and-tumble fearlessness. Her physicality is straightforward in its strength; his is imbued with mystery.
Those qualities meet when, during a party, the pair sneak onto a porch for a private dance, an electrifying duet, choreographed by Barnes. As they dash from one window to the next — inside, proper dancing is happening — they unite in forceful muscularity, jumping and stomping with the rage and exuberance of teenagers on the cusp of adulthood. Their duet is set to Dvorak in the film. But there’s a reason the actors appear to be so playfully modern: All of the dances were made using contemporary music. The porch dance was actually created to James Brown’s “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” (from the live recording of “Revolution of the Mind”). The sparkling look of the dance isn’t just about the feverish way they execute the steps; it’s also about the musicality: We may not hear James Brown, but his timeless groove haunts this dance like a ghost.
In an interview, Barnes said Gerwig told her she wanted viewers to leave the movie feeling as if they had just heard David Bowie. For Barnes that meant the film “has this contemporary feeling,” she said, “even though nothing indicates that in the costume or the music.”