Mark Reviews Movies: LITTLE WOMEN (2019)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 24, 2019

Greta Gerwig doesn't just justify the existence of another cinematic adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's beloved novel. The writer/director doesn't just show us that we deserve another version of this story. The mere existence of Gerwig's Little Women makes a strong case that we need a new telling of Alcott's tale of four sisters every generation or so.

It's a great story, yes, but we've already known that for some time, either from Alcott's novel directly or from its assorted adaptations to screen and stage. The tale of the March sisters, who grow up during the Civil War and find their places in the world in its aftermath, is specific to its era, but it's also timeless for its simple storytelling, its rich characters, and its depiction of how time both changes so much and does not affect things or people in too significant a way.

In that last regard, Gerwig's version of the story is particularly special. There's no need to reconfigure the structure of Alcott's book, divided into two parts—one in which the quartet of "little women" experience the last section of childhood and the other in which the same women have to define their adulthood. A great adaptation, such as the previously most-recent one we received from director Gillian Armstrong in 1994, need only tell this tale as Alcott wrote it.

Gerwig, though, has decided to play with the novel's structure, and the results are enlightening, thoughtful, and quite daring. In this version, the characters' pasts and the futures dance together through intercutting and sometimes devastating juxtapositions. The overwhelming feeling is that we are always in the present with these characters—their pasts leading inevitably toward their futures, their futures defined by their pasts, their heartbreaks and their joys and their deep bond as sisters an eternal constant.

The screenplay also gives us a distinct framing device, seeing the entirety of the story as Jo March's (Saoirse Ronan) coming into her own as a writer. Gerwig's adaptation opens with Jo, her hands covered in ink, trying to sell "a friend's" story to a local newspaper. The film ends with Jo, now quite confident in herself as a person and an author, negotiating the publishing terms of a novel—composed of the story we have watched unfold.

That, of course, is part of Alcott's original story. Gerwig's simple re-shaping of the tale in this particular way, though, encourages us to consider, not only how Jo has grown over the course of almost a decade, but also how vital Alcott's book is.

Jo is decidedly Jo here. When she argues about the fate of her main character with the publisher Mr. Dashwood (Tracy Letts), who thinks a woman protagonist should be married or dead by the end of a story ("Either way" is good in his mind), the protagonist might as well be Alcott, too (The ending finds an ingenious way to make the character both). Jo is, after all, a stand-in for Alcott in the author's semi-autobiographical novel (Gerwig and Ronan make Jo ambidextrous, as Alcott was). When Jo debates with her sisters about why stories about women are uncommon in their day, her/Alcott's novel becomes a necessary act of rebellion. Stories such as this matter, and Gerwig shows why this one, specifically, continues to matter.

The basics of that story remain the same here, although the shifting of time means that we're introduced to the sisters as women. Jo is in New York City, trying to make money for the family as a writer. She finds a companion in German immigrant Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel), who criticizes Jo's sensationalistic stories in a blunt but encouraging way. Jo takes it personally.

Amy (Florence Pugh, deftly playing the youngest sister in both parts of the character's drastic evolution—as both a spoiled pre-teen and a rather wise young woman) is in Paris with her judgmental paternal aunt (played by Meryl Streep), engaged to a wealthy man and learning to paint. She meets the March family's neighbor Theodore "Laurie" Laurence (Timothée Chalamet) there. He is still reeling from a rejected marriage proposal to Jo.

Eldest sister Meg (Emma Watson) is married to tutor John Brooke (James Norton), living in small cabin with the couple's two children. Her childhood desire to have pretty things, in order to keep up appearances with her wealthier friends, continues and puts a wedge between the couple. Poor Beth (Eliza Scanlen) is still house-ridden, as a childhood illness is catching up to her current health.

The film moves backwards to the past and forward to the future. The performances, the costuming, Gerwig's staging (A character in the future walks or is positioned in one direction, and in the past, the same character moves in the other), and Yorick Le Saux's cinematography (lushly romantic colors for the past and a washed-out look for the future) ensure that we always have our bearings. In that past, Jo and the sisters meet and become fast friends with Laurie, wait with their mother Marmie (Laura Dern) for news about their away-to-war father (played by Bob Odenkirk), and play games and fight and reconcile and fight and reconcile some more.

It's all as lovely, funny, and heartening as we would expect from the material, especially in how we watch the sisters learn from and follow Marmie's example of putting others before themselves. Gerwig is equally generous in giving each of the characters—from each sister, to Marmie, to the suitors, and even to the elder Mr. Laurence (Chris Cooper), who grieves for a long-dead daughter and finds some comfort in Beth's piano-playing—her or his own sense of growth.

Part of that generosity is intrinsic to the new structure of the tale, which also has the benefit of granting a more significant sense of momentum to the second part of the book. That part of the story is no longer just about what will happen between Jo and Laurie, Laurie and Amy, and Jo and Friedrich. Here, it's also about seeing, in the present of the film, how the past has led these characters to this uncertain future.

The story of Beth's illness, cruelly imposed upon her because of an act of kindness, takes on a greater level of heartbreak, too, especially in how Gerwig (with editor Nick Houy) juxtaposes the youthful energy and the melancholy of separate trips to the beach. One cut to a shot of Jo staring at Beth from a window, immediately after learning the latter's fate, is stunning in its bittersweet simplicity.

There probably will never be a definitive adaptation of this story, and that, perhaps, is a testament to its strength. Gerwig's version of Little Women shows, without any doubt, that there is still much to mine and to learn from Alcott's deceptively simple tale. This is a boisterously charming and emotionally rich adaptation, giving new life to and new ways of looking at this story.

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