Little Women (2019)
dir. Greta Gerwig
Rated: PG
image: ©2019 Sony Pictures Releasing
The 2019 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel Little Women has won box office success plus plenty of critical acclaim and awards season honors, including Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Actress and Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Score, and Costume Design. But among all those Academy Awards honors, it’s the one notable snub that stands out. Missing from the list is a nomination for Greta Gerwig’s direction. This omission particularly stings because – in addition to the long history of female directors being overlooked in the category – it’s Ms. Gerwig’s superb directing work that stands out among all the other excellent elements of the film.
I am a late-comer to the story of the March sisters: Jo, Amy, Meg, and Beth. There is an intense fan connection to the original novel, which has inspired six other film adaptations as well as numerous television and stage productions. Alcott’s beloved semi-autobiographical tale – based loosely on herself and her three sisters – depicts the struggle, joy, and aspirations in her characters’ love- and work-lives. I have never read the novel, nor had I ever seen any adaptation before now (my partner took the opportunity to introduce me to the 1994 film version starring Winona Ryder in anticipation of Gerwig’s movie). I am now one of the converted, and this new Little Women has made me anxious to read the novel.
There is a litheness to Gerwig’s direction that gives her Little Women vitality. She brings a sense of immediacy and freshness to the story; surely no easy feat when working with source material dating back 150+ years.
Gerwig’s inspired camera work is on display almost from the first frame. Jo (short for Josephine), the second eldest of the sisters and the principle character of the story, races along the New York City streets after successfully selling one of her stories to a magazine. The camera tracks alongside Jo in a frantic attempt to keep up with the writer, who supplements her income by teaching children at a local school for girls. Gerwig gleefully plays with her camera’s shutter speed a few minutes later in a dance hall scene when Jo meets Friedrich Bhaer, one of her two potential love interests.
Except in this version of Little Women, Jo doesn’t have two love interests, not really. In addition to directing, Gerwig also wrote the screenplay, and she took the opportunity to play with the story’s timeline. In Alcott’s novel, when Jo is not focusing on her burgeoning career as a writer, she is torn between Friedrich and Theodore “Laurie” Laurence, a boy she grew up with in her hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. The grandson of the March sisters’ wealthy neighbor, Laurie spends some of his time studying abroad in Europe.
Unlike the novel, which is told in linear fashion, Gerwig’s Little Women flits between the March sisters’ formative years (the “past” of the movie’s world, beginning in 1861), and their lives as young women (the “present” of 1868). So, unlike the novel, we learn in the second scene that Jo has turned down Laurie’s romantic proposition. This information is imparted to us when Jo’s sister Amy – who is acting as a traveling companion in Europe for their elderly Aunt March – runs into Laurie in Paris.
(In an example of more inspired camera work, Gerwig introduces us to heartthrob Laurie with a slow-motion shot of the character walking along the Parisian streets as Amy and Aunt March pass him in a horse-drawn carriage.)
The jumbled timeline of Little Women adds to the vitality of it that I mentioned above. It allows Gerwig and her editor, Nick Houy, to make connections and parallels between early and later events in Alcott’s story. Cinematographer Yorick Le Saux helps keep us grounded by giving the flashback sequences a warmer tone than the bluer, colder look of the story’s present. Subsequently, that technique works to comment on the glow of nostalgia most of us imbue on memories of the past.
The most audacious example of Gerwig’s fresh approach to the story is the sequence that connects two illnesses that March sister Beth suffers: a bout of scarlet fever when the girl is 13 and complications from that same disease when she is twenty. We see Jo care for Beth during both sicknesses as the film cuts scene by scene between them. Gerwig’s innovative approach to the story is a success, but in this one sequence, the rapid shift between past and present is a little too jarring.
That’s also the case with one of Gerwig’s casting decisions for the picture. The youngest sister, Amy, is only 12 in the flashbacks, and 19 in the scenes set in 1868. It would be hard for almost any actor to pull off that wide of a range, especially considering Amy is the most childish of the sisters in the scenes showing their adolescence. Because of that, two actors were cast in the role for the 1994 film version (directed by Gillian Armstrong): Kirsten Dunst as the 12-year-old version, and Samantha Mathis as the older Amy.
In this new version, Florence Pugh plays both iterations of Amy. Pugh is a phenomenal talent. I first became aware of this when I saw her in Midsommar last year. She does a splendid job of playing the adult version of Amy. The character must bear the weight of her Aunt March’s expectations that she will be the savior of the family as the only March sister who has enough sense to marry well. Her struggle between the romantic and practical aspects of marriage – which she describes to Laurie as an “economic proposition” (as true now as it was 150 years ago) – is a crushing reality, and Pugh makes us feel it.
The same is not true when she portrays the character at twelve. As talented as Pugh is, seeing a grown woman behave as a child is, frankly, bizarre. It also makes one of the major plot points of the story totally unbelievable. Little Amy does something devastating to Jo in order to get back at her sister for excluding her from a night out at the theatre. The same act might have been plausible had a child done it, but, again, seeing an adult do it just doesn’t work.
That misstep is the only one in what is otherwise a wonderfully cast film. Saoirse Ronan is brilliant as the tough, resilient Jo, who is determined to make a career as a writer in a time when it was all but impossible for a woman to do so.
Timothée Chalamet – who appeared alongside Ronan in Lady Bird, Gerwig’s 2017 solo directorial debut – is charming as Laurie. Even though we already know that Jo turns Laurie’s affections aside, when we see the scene where the two have it out about his feelings for her, both Chalamet and Ronan bring fire to the exchange. The tempestuous way they play it makes us completely forget we already know the outcome.
And for me, Little Women soars in the electric final 20 minutes or so. Gerwig goes meta here. She uses real-life circumstances surrounding the publication of Alcott’s novel and a fictional publisher – played with sarcastic glee by Tracy Letts, another Lady Bird alum – to deconstruct and comment on female artists, the art they create, and more.
Gerwig pauses the resolution of the story to examine, in bravura style, what artistic gatekeepers – who were exclusively male at the time, and are still overwhelmingly so today – expect of art created by and focusing on women.
Gerwig makes an impassioned plea throughout the film that women have more than just hearts. They have brains and souls, and Jo is emphatic that she won’t give up on her work, even if she is willing to make room for love. Considering the gatekeepers in charge of Oscar nominations saw fit to deny honoring Gerwig for her outstanding achievement in directing, it’s clear we still need Jo – and Gerwig – to remind us that women like them won’t be ignored.
Why it got 4 stars:
- I’ve seen Little Women twice now, and it grew on me quite a bit the second time around. I was much more open to what Gerwig was doing by shifting Jo’s romances to the background and moving her career struggles front and center. I also really appreciated her giving Amy almost as much focus as Jo.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- It’s just a background element in this movie, but most stories that take place during the Civil War focus on people fighting the “Lost Cause.” It was so refreshing to see a story that revolved around Union supporters.
- The scene where Laurie and Jo dance outside the house is wonderfully, joyfully anachronistic; it adds to the vitality of the movie. It’s right out of Yorgos Lanthimos’ playbook.
- Laurie seeing the little women all assembled for the first time is heartwarming. The scene where they admit Laurie into their theatre club is equally charming. I had a big, fat smile on my face during the whole scene.
- Another little directorial touch of Gerwig’s that I loved was several of the characters reading letters they had written directly to us, the audience.
- Probably the most satisfying moment in Gerwig’s juggling of the movie’s time line is a moment when Jo (in the present) is walking home, to Massachusetts, in one direction, then the film cuts to the past, where all the March sisters are walking through the same area of town, in the opposite direction. It’s such a clever little bit of storytelling.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Viewed on screener disc in the home theater. The first time was with Rach, the second time was by my lonesome. I think Cooper the dog came in once, looked around and walked back out.