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‘Little Women’: Four stars for Gerwig’s version of the classic
Fresh off “Lady Bird” (2017), a wonderful movie about a young writer leaving home, writer-director Greta Gerwig has made another wonderful movie about a young writer leaving home, although she ends up there.
Gerwig has taken on Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” which she begins with a title card featuring Alcott’s own words: “I had lots of troubles, so I write jolly tales.”
The new film’s pacing and rhythm reveals Gerwig’s full-gallop approach to the four March sisters, their mother and their intertwining private lives during and after the Civil War. The way Gerwig handles them, the March family’s stories are treated as a disarming comedy of manners under serious, cloudy skies.
Gerwig begins well after the end of the war, with Jo, played with exquisite precision by “Lady Bird” star Saoirse Ronan, in New York City. She’s negotiating with the condescending publisher Mr. Dashwood (a wry Tracy Letts, sporting this year’s best supporting muttonchops). No spinsters allowed in his stories, he scolds her, running a pencil through large swaths of her prose. Female protagonists must be “married by the end of the story. Or dead. Either way.”
Jo and her story then go back seven years, to Concord, Massachusetts, where all previous “Little Women” adaptations begin. With their pastor father (Bob Odenkirk) off fighting, the humble March home muddles through and soldiers on. Marmee (Laura Dern, as fine and honest here as she is in “Marriage Story”) in effect runs a sort of artists’ colony for her daughters: author Jo, artist Amy (Florence Pugh), pianist Beth (Eliza Scanlen) and the eldest sister, Meg (Emma Watson), who dreams of the stage.
The class divide locates the Marches on one side, and their wealthy, grieving neighbor Mr. Laurence (Chris Cooper) on the other. The latter’s dashing grandson “Laurie” is played by
Timothee Chalamet, like Ronan and Letts an alum of “Lady Bird.”
For those new to the romantic machinations of “Little Women,” let’s merely say that Laurie becomes the oscillating object of desire for more than one March. The war, off-screen, grinds on; the family nervously awaits the return of the father; one of the girls succumbs to death. Even more tragically to some readers, Jo in Alcott’s original text succumbs to a baldly
‘Little Women’
› Rating: PG for thematic elements and brief smoking Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes contrived marital wrapup with an older, stiffer, respectable pill. In Gerwig’s version, he becomes a much younger and more Jo-worthy professor and literary critic played by Louis Garrel.
In all film versions of “Little Women,” this one especially, there’s a “You Can’t Take It With You” element to the bohemian household of eccentric artists at work and play. The top-flight cinematographer Yorick Le Saux chases after the swirl of activity with a masterly eye for natural light, or light faked to look that way. In Gerwig’s film, the Civil War-era sequences move quickly, with a lot of short scenes, while the postwar storyline becomes calmer and more stately.
It takes a little while to get the hang of it. Gerwig’s
adaptation lays out a challenging interweave of adult Jo’s development as a writer, set in counterpoint to her exhilarating blur of a life several years earlier — full of love, longing, tragedy and artistic ferment. Now and then the story compass takes a moment to establish direction. These aren’t serious flaws, though. They’re more like imaginative hurdles Gerwig and her inspired collaborators have set up for themselves. The idea is to make Jo’s advancement in the world live and breathe in the present; the present just happens to be the 1860s, a time when women had precious little legal or societal currency.
The casting’s not entirely ideal: Watson seems like the youngest March sister, not the oldest, and while Chalamet’s a huge talent, his Laurie seems a little fogged-in, even as the years pass. Meryl Streep dines out on the role of the cranky Aunt March, whose money comes with endless strands of guilt and recrimination. She’s also loving, in her way. Gerwig, like Alcott, sees many sides of everyone on her canvas.