January 4, 2020
This is what happens when you take a timeless story and film it with creativity, vision, and intelligence. Louisa May Alcott's novel has been adapted no fewer than seven times. Here Greta Gerwig has produced the most mature telling, one that delights and adds deeply to discussion, and does so deftly.
As if to one of its own beloved characters, the book presented Gerwig with decision after decision to personalize her drama. She's taken each step boldly. Gone are the very young childhood scenes. We join the action as Jo decides to abandon her writing in New York to care for her ailing sister, Beth (Eliza Scanlen), back home in Concord. Youngest sister Amy (Florence Pugh) and Laurie (Timothee Chalamet) are already in France. Meg (Emma Watson) is already married to the penniless John Brooke (James Norton). Their legendary upbringing, drama productions, debutante balls, courtships---all are seen in flashback.
Why use flashback? This is the most mature telling of Little Women because of the focus that the technique forces on us. Those memories immediately shape the present. Gerwig uses warm lighting and costuming, and sometimes hairstyles, to sweeten the past. The film therefore exchanges a novel-esque, sprawling narrative feel for a pointed analysis emphasizing Jo's reflection, at a critical juncture, on her life's decisions. It is the difference between a bath and a shower. Other adaptations luxuriate in the sisters' interactions. Here there is heightened purpose if not the feeling of a domestic epic.
The trailer plays up a feminist angle---an unsubtle one, emphasizing the wrong shades of the dilemmas that the March sisters grapple with. This is another reason to avoid trailers, even if you know the plot already. No, Gerwig in fact paints a complicated picture. It is subtle, intelligent, and seamlessly woven. "I'm so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for," Jo says, and the trailer cuts her off. Yet she goes on, in the film, "But I am so lonely."
That is the heart of Gerwig's statement here. In Alcott's day it was a triumph for a woman to break into a career. Now we must demand more---balance between career and family. Society has changed, but unless it changes more, and even then unless working mothers and wives are granted more hours in the day, how can a woman fulfill each of her vocations, whatever she chooses them to be? The film is not simply about opportunity for women but about the burden Jo feels in balancing those callings.
Indeed, it gives equal weight to both. Despite her independent spirit and her goals, at her innermost Jo also longs for love. Gerwig treats that desire, and that of raising a family, with just as much respect in her portrayal of Meg, especially in her wedding-morning scene. Whether society's pressure on Jo and its overall structure cause that desire, whether that's fair, is a deep question that I welcome you to debate. Nature or nurture or independence.
Nonetheless the point is that Jo decides she wants it. Has her literary ambition cost her her chance to have a family like the one she grew up in? Why should it when that same drive doesn't hinder a man? These are the same questions women face today. Gerwig brings them immediacy.
Given the tightly wound plot structure, the filmmaking must be taut. It wouldn't be Little Women without superb antebellum settings and gorgeous colonial homes. In a year with no signature score, Alexandre Desplat proves again that he stands out among his generation of composers. Music has always played a vital role in Little Women; Beth, the pianist, has somewhat more personality here than in other adaptations. Her connection with Mr. Lawrence---played finely by Chris Cooper as mysterious at first, then warm---strikes the most emotion. And this is becoming if not the Year then at least the Olympic Cycle of Laura Dern, who gives another strong performance (Star Wars, Marriage Story) as a feminist-minded leader.
Saoirse Ronan plays Jo as a spring loaded with energy. Even in simple movements, she bounces. Laurie by contrast is the millennial's suitor, drifting about Europe secure in family wealth. Christian Bale gave us both the playful club member and the serious lawyer in Gillian Anderson's 1994 version. Indeed, where the lead actresses impress, their men fall a bit short. The ladies outperform them, or perhaps for me it was Bale and Gabriel Byrne whose venerable shadow reached over the lads.
Gerwig's flashback strategy includes trade-offs that restrain the climax. Friedrich already suffers from not being a suave and passionate Gabriel Byrne. But in addition we've no time left for, or no suitable moment to cut to, Friedrich and Jo drawing close in New York over their love for literature and her writing. Gerwig also sacrifices his acclaim for Jo's book in order to gain Jo more independence. Jo doesn't need Friedrich's approval, the director says, but their relationship then is paper-thin by the time he drops in at the end.
I admire Gerwig's new take on the ending, its perfectly understated execution, even if I don't agree with its statement. We have the embrace we expect, the swelling music, the "empty hands." Then we have a second embrace placed in the more prominent, anchor position. It ingeniously and subtly reflects Jo's true heart, but it also relegates what I am saddened to see relegated.
However noble our labor, we get up each workday and leave our loved ones in order to come back to them. We ought to remember, and not lament, that we are all fit for many things, but the greatest of these is still love.
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