‘Little Women’ is handsome holiday fare
Louisa May Alcott’s cherished work of feel-good Americana and celebration of sisterhood has resonated with readers since its publication in 1868, and with moviegoers since the silent-film era, so much so that we remake it once every generation or three.
Perhaps it felt due for a refresh, even though Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 adaptation starring Winona Ryder remains beloved. Watching Greta Gerwig’s 2019 “Little Women” is like visiting an old friend for tea. The conversation may not surprise, but that’s what makes the
company a warm comfort.
The basics remain the same: The four March sisters come of age in Concord, Massachusetts, under the loving
guidance of saint-like Marmee (Laura Dern) while their father helps the Union in the Civil War.
There’s bookish and headstrong tomboy Jo (Saoirse Ronan), nearly every reader’s favorite; domestic and compliant eldest sister Meg (Emma Watson); gentle and sickly Beth (Eliza Scanlen), the pet of the family; and vain and artistic baby sister Amy (Florence Pugh).
“Little Women” is handsome and heartfelt, and doesn’t much make a case for the necessity of its existence beyond the pleasures of itself, which are inconsistent in substance and style.
Watson tries to add depth and dimension to poor overlooked Meg, but her efforts are undermined by her breathless and rigid line delivery; she’s simply diminished by the superior acting around her. Scanlen may well have been a very fine Beth, but she simply isn’t given anything to do, and her’s character’s arc, so affecting elsewhere, fizzles here.
On the other end of the spectrum, Ti
mothée Chalamet continues to assert himself as our inevitable millennial heartthrob as romantic neighbor boy Laurie, burning with swoon-worthy unrequited love for Jo.
The real revelation though is Pugh. Fresh off her mesmerizing and emotionally raw performance in this year’s “Midsommar,” she transforms bratty and much-derided Amy into the most complicated and sympathetic March sister. Pugh’s Amy does the most growing up, and one might argue Pugh should have instead been cast as Jo; Ronan does lovely work, but everyone’s favorite sister ends up feeling a little flat in comparison to Pugh’s transformative work.
One way in which Gerwig distinguishes her adaptation is by getting fancy with the timeline. While the book and other adaptations proceed chronologically, beginning with the sisters as girls and growing up with them, Gerwig’s film jumps forward and backward in the Marches’ lives, revealing early the story’s surprising third-act developments. The writing and editing aren’t up to the task of retrofitting Alcott’s straightforward narrative with a sophisticated chronology and rob it of dramatic tension in the process.
It’s also simply impractical. All four girls are (at least as of now) in their 20s, cast without any younger counterparts, playing characters during a seven-year span of their most dramatic developmental years. It’s conceptually difficult to accept all four as children in one scene, adults in the next, and then children again, with only differing hairstyles and mannerisms to distinguish between the two. The constant readjustment is confusing and tiresome work, and it isn’t always clear that the years have changed.
These are not minor problems. But they perhaps feel minor given the tricky thing that Gerwig has gotten exceptionally right: that this 151-year-old story about young women carving out paths of happiness for themselves in an era that makes doing so difficult is as relevant now as when it was written. “Little Women” makes explicit the normally genteelly implied reality that women have need of money, and their avenues to it are more limited than a man’s.
Bustles and parasols may be a thing of the past, but when Jo declares, “I can’t get over my disappointment at being a girl,” she may as well be speaking from the present.