I can’t say that I have ever read Louise May Alcott’s Little Women, but I am somewhat familiar with the story because my ex-wife was really into all things Winona Ryder, including the 1994 movie version. I remember it mostly because at the end, after Claire Danes died, Ryder’s Jo rejected young Christian Bale but then ended up with Gabriel Byrne. And that seemed a little nutty.
But then we got this new version with writer/director Greta Gerwig teaming up again with actress Saoirse Ronan. Their previous collaboration, Lady Bird, was a great slice of life drama showing a mother and daughter squabble in the daughter’s last year of high school. Now they’re back for an adaptation of Little Women? Well, I knew what I was seeing on Christmas day.
Told in a non-linear manner where the opening moments come from scenes that happen late in the book–something I know because of a woman sitting next to me commenting as much to her friend–we begin with Jo March (Ronan), selling stories anonymously in New York City. She has a tense relationship with another boarder named Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel). Her sisters are scattered to the four winds. Older sister Meg (Emma Watson) is a married mother of two with financial problems. Younger sister Amy (Florence Pugh) is touring France with their wealthy spinster aunt (Meryl Streep). And youngest sister Beth (Eliza Scanlen) is a sickly girl still living in their parents’ house. In France, Amy meets up with family friend Laurie (Timothee Chalamet), himself nursing a broken heart from a recent rejection of marriage from Jo.
That’s all set-up. From there, the movie flashes back and forth to a point in time seven years earlier, when the girls’ father was off fighting in the Civil War and their kind and generous mother (Laura Dern) was left to care for them. We start with Meg and Jo going to a local dance. Meg wants to maybe meet a potential husband. Jo doesn’t ever want to marry but meets her new neighbor Laurie there, and the two hit it off in part because Gerwig writes and directs the pair as being very similar people, showing Jo’s eventual rejection is a smart move since he’s more like a brother to the tomboyish Jo than anything else. He fits in very well with the Marches.
From there, we basically see how the Marches grow up and become the “little women” their father refers to them as. And while most of the story focuses on the aspiring author Jo, Gerwig does give some time to the other three while still keeping some surprises in the narrative. All things being equal, Meg’s and Beth’s respective plots are both fairly weak. Even though we know from the beginning Meg’s married and not very well off, we don’t see who her husband is right away any more than we see whether or not the girls’ father returns from the war or not, and much of Meg’s issues are solved well before the end of the movie. Beth, on the other hand, is a quiet introvert with a gift for playing the piano whose whole purpose seems to be getting sick.
That said, there is a good character arc given to Amy. I heard on an NPR panel discussion that many fans of the novel can’t stand Amy, and it isn’t hard to see why based on her actions. But Pugh makes the girl likable as she follows her own path. A perfectionist painter who wants to marry well, if there’s one flaw to the movie, it’s that Pugh plays the character throughout the movie. Not being familiar with the novel, I wasn’t sure why Meg and Jo were going to the ball at the beginning of the movie without Amy (or Beth for that matter). Amy really wanted to go but was told to stay home. Amy gives her age later in the movie, and some basic math told me Pugh was playing the character as a girl of 12 or 13 in those scenes, and she’s a twentysomething actress and it didn’t quite click in my head when I saw it. Amy, as a character, feels a lot of frustration over coming in behind her more outgoing sister Jo for much of her life, and that explains a lot about her actions.
Ultimately, this was just a great movie that is alternately fun and touching, and even a bit of a tearjerker. Even knowing from the opening scenes what would become of Jo and Laurie didn’t make his heartbreak any easier when the movie finally caught up to it. I saw this in a fairly packed theater and it looked like the audience was 90% female. Right now, I’m thinking this is the sort of movie that will make me want to read the book it’s based on. I love movies like that.
Grade: A
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