Little Women: A Timely Adaptation of a Timeless Tale

Back in 2017, I reviewed Lady Bird, the directorial debut of Greta Gerwig, and while I was initially positive toward it in my review, I had a difficult time understanding why every critic and their dog was going gaga for it like it was this wholly transformative and transcendent work that defies the medium when I just saw it as a solid, incredibly well acted but still pretty conventional coming of age story. Maybe it’s just a me problem and I’m the one who’s out of touch, but I still saw Gerwig for the talented storyteller that she is, and was willing to give her next movie a fair shake. Seeing that her next project was going to be an adaptation of Little Women, the classic American novel by Louisa May Alcott, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect.

I sure as hell wasn’t expecting it to be one of my favorite movies of the year.

For those of you who read the book in middle school or seen the dozens of other adaptations, the basic outline of the story has more or less been kept intact. For those of you who haven’t, here’s what you need to know: Little Women follows the lives of the Marches, four sisters from post-Civil War New England. Meg (Emma Watson) is a level-headed socialite looking to get married, Jo (Saoirse Ronan) is a stubborn, passionate tomboy with dreams of becoming a writer, Beth (Eliza Scanlen) is a shy introvert and a talented pianist, and Amy (Florence Pugh) is a temperamental artist who constantly butts heads with Jo. While their father (Bob Odenkirk) is volunteering in the war, the March household is turned over to their saintly mother (Laura Dern) and turned into an incubator of love, creativity and ambition.

Much like Lady Bird, Little Women is a laser focused microcosm of a particularly eventful stretch in the lives of its teenage heroines whose struggles are exceptionally ordinary in comparison to the high-stakes sensationalism of your average blockbuster, but are nevertheless just as riveting and captivating. The March sisters struggle with poverty, securing work and dealing with injustices, but they never let those hardships get in the way of their aspirations of obtaining their own ideal version of autonomy of their lives. Most of the action is just these sisters living their lives, arguing with each other one moment and having each other’s back the next. About twenty minutes in, they cease to be characters and are now full-fledged human beings with their own family dynamic, wants, needs and desires in all their contradictory glory.

While there are several elements that accomplish this cozy chaos, from Yorick Le Saux’s glowing cinematography to Nick Houy’s airtight editing to Alexander Desplat’s nostalgic score, it’s the cast that brings it all home, each adding a whole new sense of nuance to these time-tested characters. Saoirse Ronan reunites with Gerwig for a second time as the fiery tomboy Jo, whose outspoken nature and strive for independence makes her someone for whom admitting to her own loneliness is harder than leaving home to pursue her writing career. Florence Pugh’s turn as Amy has all the passion and drive of Jo, but is driven more by an innate sense of cynical pragmatism, choosing to find happiness within the system rather than defy it. Emma Watson as Meg is a compassionate realist with an affinity for the finer things in life, who wants the best for her loved ones and herself. (“Just because my dreams are different from yours doesn’t mean they’re less important” she tells Jo on her wedding day.) Even the quiet, oft-overlooked Beth is elevated from the epitome of feminine self-sacrifice at its logical extreme. The true stroke of genius, however, is casting Timothée Chalamet as Laurie, the neighbor and best friend to all four sisters and the love interest of at least two. This version of Laurie is recontextualized as a 19^th Century fuckboy whose just handsome enough that you sort of believe these girls would let him get away with his heartbreaking antics.

The themes of having to square one’s childhood ambitions in the face of adult responsibilities and family duties that made the book such a relevant touchstone for generations of women and girls are present and accounted for, but Gerwig adds a few small but important details that add a whole new dimension. The first is intercutting the narrative between the first and second halves of the book, comparing and contrasting the happy times of their childhood with the various directions their lives took once they parted ways and carved out paths of their own. This scrambling of the chronology has the added bonus of creating rhyming events and having the more dramatic payoffs have more heft by letting the audience know where these girls end up ahead of time, especially when they all reunite in the wake of a family tragedy. The second is rewriting Jo’s fate and authorly ambitions by having her write the story that would become Little Women, and having her struggles mirror those Louisa May Alcott faced on to the road to publication, right down to pressure from her publisher to have her main character married by the end. Normally I’m not a big fan of the trope of the main character writing the story we just read/watched, but here it works since at a certain point she suffers from a near crippling bout of writer’s block, and the narrative tweak allows Gerwig to vindicate some of the more unfavorable directions Elcott took the book in under her publisher’s demands.

Bottom line, Little Women is one for the ages. It’s a top to bottom expertly crafted, brilliantly acted rendition of a timeless tale presented through a new lens that’ll give you that warm feeling that one hopes for during the holidays. It at once pays respect to the source material and elevates it. In an exhausting year (and decade, for that matter), I couldn’t think of a better way to close it off.

9/10