Alistair Harkness reviews Little Women
Playing with Fire (PG)
It’s been 15 years since the last significant cinematic adaptation of
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s classic Civil War novel about a quartet of squabbling sisters reckoning with love, loss and their own diverging destinies. That film – directed by Gillian Armstrong and starring Winona Ryder, Kristen Dunst, Clare Danes and Christian Bale – did a decent job of transferring the novel to the big screen without diminishing its charms; but there’s a reason Alcott’s Christmassy tale has endured for generations and writer/director Greta Gerwig, following up Lady
Bird, transforms this new version into something that both honours the joyful appeal of the novel while slyly modifying and modernising it for the current moment.
Restructuring it as a non-linear story, one with an amusing meta flourish that shouldn’t be spoiled in a review, the film homes in first on Saoirse Ronan’s Jo, an aspiring writer who wants more from life than to marry well. Determined to secure payment for her stories, she’s a restless, forthright spirit, wily enough to avoid being ripped off, but too conscientious to abandon her family as they teeter on the brink of poverty. Thenceforth the film flashes back and forth between her and her sisters’ late adolescence and early adulthood, with Gerwig quickly introducing us to the rest of the March clan: sensible Meg (Emma Watson), delicate Beth (Eliza Scanlan), artistically precocious Amy (Florence Pugh), their beloved and resilient mother Marmie (played by Laura Dern), their wealthy aunt (Meryl Streep), and Laurie, their tousle-haired, hottieof-a-neighbour, played here with languorous lustiness by a perfectly cast Timothée Chalamet.
Though the film remains true to the plot beats of its source, which is built around the petty (but not really)
concerns of this clan in the absence of head of the household, Mr March (Bob Odenkirk), who is away fighting for the Northern cause, Gerwig’s re-arranging of the material and her decision to age-up the adolescent versions of the girls so they can be played by the same actors are smart choices that add dramatic weight to the story, not least in the rivalry between Amy and Jo, which is aided by Pugh’s ability to find real depth beneath Amy’s bratty disposition. But it’s unmistakably Gerwig’s movie; her comic sensibility, her generosity of spirit, even the shaggy haircut Jo gets midway through – it’s all a reflection of the signature style she’s been developing, first as a writer and performer in the likes of
Hannah takes the Stairs, Frances Ha
and Mistress America ,andnowas a director. With Little Women she’s put her stamp on a classic and made it her own the way great filmmakers always do.
There’s nothing great about Playing
with Fire, an incompetently put together family film about a squarejawed, uber-macho smokejumper (John Cena) who learns to be more compassionate via the miracle of enforced parenthood. (Smokejumpers are specially trained firefighters who parachute into remote terrain to tackle wildfires.) Like an even more charmless Daddy’s
Home (in which Cena had a cameo role), it mistakenly thinks tough guys plus cutesy kids equals big laughs. It doesn’t, as proved when Cena’s straight laced, up-for-promotion fire chief rescues three bratty siblings from a burning log cabin and has to take care of them when it transpires they’re orphaned runaways. Pratfalls and poop jokes duly follow, but director Andy Fickman can’t even make those work, ensuring that the trying-too-hard antics of Cena (frequently shirtless to show-off his creepy He-man physique), along with fellow performers Keegan-michael Key, John Leguizamo and Judy Greer (cast as the token love interest), flame out. Avoid. ■