Genre:
Drama, Romance
Produced by:
Amy Pascal, Denise Di Novi, Robin Swicord
Directed by:
Greta Gerwig
Written by:
Greta
Gerwig
Production Company: Columbia Pictures
Starring: Saoirse
Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Timothee Chalamet, Laura
Dern, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Louis Garrel, Tracy Letts, James Norton, Bob
Odenkirk
Runtime: 135 minutes
SYNOPSIS:
In the years after the American Civil
War, Jo March (Saoirse Ronan) is now
a grown up young lady living in New York City, aspiring to be taken seriously
as a writer. Jo’s journey towards completing her novel and also being the voice
of the underrepresented takes her back to the time she spent in Concord,
Massachusetts with her three sisters – Amy (Florence Pugh), Meg (Emma
Watson) and Beth (Eliza Scanlen)
– as, like her, they try to live their life their own way and come to terms with
its rewards and consequences.
REVIEW:
With a story that perfectly epitomizes its
author’s ideals and criticism of the society’s way of life, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) is one of those 19th century popular
literatures with cross-generational appeal. The fact that many educational
institutions today still consider her novel as required reading for students
all around the world speaks volume about its long-lasting influence. Its
historical context doesn’t detract from the modern-day relevance of its main subject
matter: the struggle of women in a man’s world. In light of the #MeToo
movement, Alcott’s work feels almost
uncannily prophetic as history continues to repeat itself throughout the 20th
century and into the 21st century.
Little
Women’s
boldness to bring the issue up, especially in a time when her material might
seem too edgy, made it such an instant best-seller that it then became a
literary franchise, spawning two more sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo’s
Boys (1886). Since then, the franchise’s first chapter has been adapted for
the screen numerous times, whether into a silent film, a black and white film,
or a color film. But one thing that’s in common with those adaptations is they
feature some of Hollywood’s celebrated actresses such as Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Winona Ryder playing members of the March sisters.
2019’s Little Women simply continues this long tradition that had begun as
far back as a hundred years ago with Alexander
Butler’s lost 1917 adaptation. Written and directed by Greta Gerwig of Lady Bird
(2017) fame this time around, the film marks the seventh feature-length
adaptation of Alcott’s novel and the
second one under the Columbia Pictures banner after Gillian Armstrong’s most recent 1994 version. Taking on such a
mainstream title definitely represents a massive jump for Gerwig, following her humble, low-budget directorial debut. Still,
her Oscar-nominated Lady Bird clout
gives her the opportunity to get pretty much all of the who’s who in 2019 for
the project, ranging from her previous collaborators Saoirse Ronan, Timothee
Chalamet and Tracy Letts,
seasoned actresses Emma Watson and Laura Dern and then up-and-comers like Florence Pugh and Eliza Scanlen.
Little
Women
is the cinematic equivalent of a warm, cozy hug on a cold, wintry day: so
lovely, reassuring and full of infectiously childlike exuberance. Though it has
a 136-minute runtime, this umpteenth 2019 big-screen adaptation of Alcott’s story feels like 90 to 100
minute at most. The film manages to move the narrative along faster than most
two hour plus long character-driven dramas. It’s such an utterly fun,
delightful treat for the whole family that has its heart in the right place. It
brilliantly carries over the source material’s timely and timeless theme of
sororal bond in ways that not only capture the spirit of its writer’s work and
life, but also add more than enough contemporary slants to justify its own
existence.
Thematically and scale-wise, Little Women is the natural progression
for Gerwig’s fledgling career thus
far. Her distinctively quirky and yet somewhat welcoming voice is prevalent throughout
this version, demonstrating the filmmaker’s ability to reach the mainstream
accessibility of a mid-budget studio drama while also preserving her trademark arthouse
sensibilities. There’s a stately elegance and fly-on-the-wall intimacy about
her direction that excellently transports the present-day viewers to the setting
of Concord 1860’s and then deeper into some of its characters’ inner souls. Bearing
in mind Gerwig’s success with handling a young adult coming-of-age story of a
bygone era in Lady Bird, Little Women sits comfortably within her
wheelhouse, making her just the right person to do Alcott’s vision justice.
What sets the 2019 adaptation apart from
the rest is its refreshingly ambitious, almost Christopher Nolan-esque storytelling style. Gerwig adopts a unique approach to retelling an otherwise familiar narrative,
foregoing Alcott’s linear structure
for a more fragmented and non-linear one as the film jumps back and forth
between the March sisters’ childhood and adulthood. Watching her interpretation
of Little Women is tantamount to someone
ripping up all the pages out of its source material and then taping them back
together again into something that resembles a book with all the pages in the
wrong order.
But somehow the overall impact of that
rearrangement is still remarkable, with all those wildly disparate elements combining
into a cohesive, satisfying whole. 2019’s Little
Women is a well-thought-out subversion of the way people generally process the literary classic. Gerwig’ s screenplay ignites a profound
feeling of hopefulness and regret that dovetails with the film’s reflective
nature as the sisters try to come to terms with what happened in the past and what
is happening now. As the narrative occasionally jumps ahead of the
chronological order, the early revelation about what person a certain character
has become and, through flashbacks, the gradual elaboration of how he/she get
to that point in time adds poignancy and a note of melancholy to the rest of
the proceedings.
Gerwig’s Little Women is also a clever, subtly incisive
meta-commentary on Alcott’s own experience
writing the aforementioned novel, in which the film is bookended by the
present-day scenes of Jo sitting across an unimpressed newspaper editor Mr.
Dashwood (Tracy Letts) in his
office, trying to sell him her work.
Reminiscent of Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002),
it uses its story-within-a-story
conceit to give some semi-autobiographical relevance to the assorted coming-of-age
scenarios, intersecting the March sisters’ domestic lives with that of Jo’s attempt
at a writing career in New York. This jumbled timeline helps sustain a weirdly
real-time momentum to the idea of Jo as Alcott’s
avatar developing her Little Women
novel. The entire film is purely a vivid immersion into a writer’s creative process,
where the faint outlines of Jo’s vague childhood memories living in Concord are
a bunch of jigsaw puzzles she has to piece together until they eventually form
the bigger picture. And sometimes, the first idea doesn’t necessarily mean the
beginning of the story, lending credibility to the narrative’s skewed internal logic.
The film reimagines Alcott’s coming-of-age story as a lyrical exploration on life
imitating art and vice versa, where a story pretty much reflects the author’s
reaction and behavior towards the real world. Thanks to Gerwig’s signature crisp, snappy dialogue, 2019’s Little Women creates a recognizable,
fully-realized world that looks as if everyone inhabits the same reality as Jo
and also deal with the same timely and timeless issues such as gender
inequality, class divide and generational gap.
Her screenplay doesn’t mind letting her
characters and messages unravel slowly but quietly over the course of a series
of lengthy discussions or conversations. The film’s wordplay walks that fine
line between laugh-out-loud hilarious and thought-provokingly biting pretty
well. In one scene, Jo engages in a polite, but philosophically heated argument
with the filthy rich widow Aunt March (Meryl
Streep) about what constitute a woman’s ultimate happiness that ends with
the latter responding flippantly, “well, that’s because I’m rich”.
The fact that the “I’m rich” line is not
in the book and it is entirely Gerwig’s
idea and that it is quite easily the best line in the entire film speaks
volumes about her knack for dialogue-driven materials. Furthermore, that line,
one amongst many, reveals quite a lot about the period’s black-and-white
perspective of a woman’s role in the society: to be the wife of a rich man, a
sentiment later echoed by Mr. Dashwood when he tries persuading Jo to change
her story’s ending for the sake of political correctness. Jo’s unwillingness to
accept such seemingly inevitable fate is what keeps the stakes personal and the
constant threat of that particular societal norm tripping her way painful.
At the same time, Jo is a sharply drawn character,
a very complex heroine who teeters somewhere between tomboyish spirit and feminine
grace. Little Women both recognizes and accepts Jo as simply a woman who deals with the
same problems and feels the same way as her fellow gender, even if her ideals
contradict with that of the stereotypical nineteenth century women. There’s
this one tender, heartbreaking scene that encapsulates how a woman views womanhood,
in which Jo, aware of her family’s financial problems, tries to appear stoic
and resilient when she reveals that she cut her hair short to help raise some money
and later devolves into an emotional wreck in Amy’s arms over losing her long hair.
Speaking of Amy, she too more than meets the eye as an individual, the youngest
and most manipulative of the March sisters who has got a compelling motivation
behind going as far as burning Jo’s manuscript. Amy’s extreme actions in this
version are a token of sisterly love, of someone who idolizes her elder sister so
much she would do anything to get her attention. Jo’s tumultuous relationship
with Amy is the emotional crux of the film.
Little
Women is
also a film of undeniable technical craftsmanship. For a start, it is truly a miracle in costume design
and makeup/hairstyling.
Jacqueline
Durran’s
costuming is drop dead gorgeous and the makeup department’s hair work is done
with meticulous precision. Everything about the March sisters’ period dresses
and their look in general is period accurate and an ultimate fashion statement.
Beyond that, they do quite a lot of the narrative heavy lifting for Gerwig, in which the contrast between
beauty and squalor offer the film a clear sense of time and place.
Yorick
Le Saux’s
immaculate cinematography sets the ambience and mood of the different timelines,
settling for the idyllic brightness of a Christmas-themed mural for the flashback
sequences and the gray bleakness of a nuclear winter for the present-day
sequences. Nick Houy’s fine editing is
the glue that holds its non-linear structure in place, making the scene
transition from past and present flow seamlessly and comprehensibly. Alexandre Desplat infuses the score
with playfulness and whimsy that compliments the film’s amiable display of
sisterly and familial togetherness.
Whether it’s by default of the source
material or its own volition, Little
Women falls slightly by the wayside because the story’s main focus on Jo
and Amy eventually gives just about everyone else the short shrift.
Meg and Beth are the most thinly drawn of
the principal foursome, with little to define them beyond being members of the
March sisters. They are barely in the film, often relegated to the background
to allow Jo and Amy some more breathing space. These young women don’t seem to
really have much of a personal life of their own outside their familial
connection, which is too bad since their individual arcs have intriguing
potential. But it gets lost in the screenplay’s overarching mix.
The film has the basic idea of what it’s
like to be them, but the development is half-baked and shallow. Meg, the eldest
sister, is a traditional stay-at-home wife and that’s really it. A scene that suggests
there’s a marital strain between Meg and her husband John Brooke (James Norton) is the only time her arc feels
like it’s going anywhere, but that doesn’t detract from how bare-bones her
overall story is. Beth, the second youngest, is a rather flat character who
only has one trait for the majority of the film: she likes to play the piano. Her
sickness serves as a conventional plot device to manipulate the audience into
caring for a character that the screenplay kind of doesn’t.
There is also the relationship arc between
Jo and her colleague Professor Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel) back in New York that wounds up being truncated. Jo
and Friedrich’s story begins directly with them already pretty close with each
other, and yet, the film never bothers even once to explain how these
characters arrive at this particular moment, skipping over quite a lot of the specifics
necessary to flesh out their blossoming relationship.
This aspect of the screenplay gets
bogged down with too much of the telling and too little of the showing, reducing
the historical significance of their relationship by a few casual throwaway
lines here and there and a fleeting, blink-it-and-you’ll-miss-it montage.
Rather than fill in the blanks, it further renders their relationship and, to a
certain extent, Friedrich’s presence irrelevant, as if he’s just a guy she
meets one time in her life than something much more.
For the most part, the film doesn’t know
what to do with the Friedrich character, emphasized by his conspicuous absence
throughout the entire second act. He is such an afterthought, a long forgotten
presence whose sudden reappearance later almost feels like it comes out of left
field and unearned.
Little
Women’s
uneven treatment of the supporting characters is salvaged by the embarrassment
of acting riches. The ensemble cast all across the board is uniformly first-rate,
making the most of the usual array of stock archetypes populating these
period/coming-of-age dramas. But the biggest stars of this show are no doubt the
four leads playing the March sisters. Gerwig
has assembled an eclectic mix of accomplished and novice actresses for the aforementioned
coveted roles, and her decision works, creating a sisterly dynamic that’s as
sweet and dysfunctional as it is believable. The chemistry between Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Eliza Scanlen
and Florence Pugh is so effortless
it’s as if their characters transcend its fictional limitations.
Saoirse
Ronan
provides a compelling case of why she is Gerwig’s
favored muse, because she turns in yet again another magnetic, possibly career-best
central performance in her film, this time around by portraying American
literature’s most beloved heroine Jo March. Ronan taps into the character’s inner feminist angst and rebellious
streak with wit, verve and emotional nuance. As far as supporting actresses go,
Florence Pugh is the film’s real
scene stealer as the pompous, driven Amy, the youngest in the March family. Pugh’s Amy is fierce, relentless and,
most importantly, multi-layered, imbuing a seemingly irritable character on the
surface with the kind of human dimension that makes her selfish needs
understandable and even admirable.
Eliza
Scanlen
is simply the epitome of angelic kindness here, showing sweet, almost
too-good-to-be-true innocence as the saintly, ill-stricken Beth, the second
youngest in the March family. Scanlen isn’t
given that much to do on the page, but for what she was asked to do, she
generates enough sympathy and even a tiny pull at the heartstrings. Emma Watson does a pretty decent job of
channeling the prim and proper image and quality of the stereotypical nineteenth
century American girl through her character Meg, the eldest sister in the March
family. Her American accent though is a bit all over the map, too often slipping
in and out of it throughout the entire film.
In his second collaboration with Gerwig, Timothee Chalamet cements his status as one of the finest actors in
the sad boys club. Chalamet is
ideally suited for the part of American literature’s ultimate sad boy Laurie, playing
the character with the sort of teen heartthrob-ish boyish charm and teen
bravado that he has brought in other roles. Unfortunately, Louis Garrel is the film’s weakest link. Garrel is just passable and unremarkable as Professor Friedrich
Bhaer, a pale shadow of Gabriel Byrne’s
memorable interpretation of that similar role. His dashing, debonair good looks
make him appealing as Jo’s love interest, but beyond that, he is unconvincing
as a highly distinguished professor, lacking Byrne’s sophisticated swagger.
Laura
Dern
brings pathos to the steady, nurturing maternal presence of the March’s
matriarch Marmee, exemplified by the one shocking, well-acted moment of her
character confessing to her daughter Jo about her well-kept anger issues. Tracy Letts injects his trademark
gruff, tough, no-nonsense personality into the typically thankless role of a
newspaper editor Mr. Dashwood, breathing some life into his razor-sharp
interplay with Ronan’s Jo.
Meanwhile, Meryl Streep is at the
top of her scenery-chewing, domineering game here, so blunt and intimidating
without having to lift even a single finger as Aunt March. Chris Cooper plays Laurie’s biological father and occasionally a
father figure for the March family Mr. Laurence in a gentlemanly manner.
CONCLUSION:
Little
Women
is Greta Gerwig’s funny, moving and
incredibly warm-hearted adaptation of Louisa
May Alcott’s beloved classic that stays true to the essence of its source
material while also taking an oft-told, public domain story to fresh, audacious
direction.
Score: 9/10
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