REVIEW: Little Women (2019)

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I went to see this last week, but I could only post this now.

So, Little Women:

Adapted and Directed by: Greta Gerwig
Based on ‘Little Women’ and ‘Good Wives’. written by Louisa M. Alcott.
Starring: Saorise Ronan, Florence Pugh, Timothee Chalamet, Laura Dern.
Rated: U

Although I had prejudices going in (one big one I’ll get to, but one certainly was that it feels as though we only just had the TV adaptation involving Angela Lansbury) and nitpicks going out, this was very good and emotionally satisfying. Gerwig’s choice to tell the story in two timelines is a smart and interesting choice. The film introduces us to an adultJo struggling to sell her stories in New York and then what her sisters are doing, before flashing back to ‘seven years ago’, and switching between the two timelines subsequently. Mostly this is not confusing and finds effective points of contact, though it you’re not familiar with the story: follow the hairstyles.

This choice makes it clear that Jo’s love story as a woman is with Bhaer, while she and Laurie aren’t meant to be, while his involvement with a grown-up, more serious Amy is foregrounded before we see him getting to know the March girls. This plays out very differently to adapting the story chronologically, I think and I enjoyed it. Nonetheless, I still believe that the ideal way to adapt these books is to take a Boyhood approach and film in two sections. It would most clearly help with Amy, then Jo and Laurie, but even Meg and Beth.

Jo-as-a-writer is vitally important to the film, and there’s more pushing of the limited opportunities for women and an meta argument for why ‘Little Women’ was so important – to show that girls and women have minds, souls and ambitions as well as heart. Towards the end, it gets a little less naturalistic, with Jo’s correspondence with her publisher getting acted out, and Jo seeming to have a conversation about the ending of her story. My objection to that was that the rest of the film hadn’t been in that style, so it sat oddly.

However, there is so much that the film gets right. The tempo lends vitality, the soundtrack is subtly effective, and I loved the costumes, most of all the lived-in winter nightclothes. Ronan is ‘capital’ as Jo, capturing the tomboyishness, the urgent life force and she’s matched by Pugh as Amy, who claims your attention over Meryl Streep! Gerwig develops the idea that Amy has always been in love with Laurie, which works beautifully, and our impression of her is shaded by first meeting her as the daughter-of-Marmee rebuking Laurie for being indolent. We know she’s going to grow out of being the brat that Jo finds her as. Having said that, although she gets the character spot on all the time, putting Pugh in plaits does not make her a convincing 13 year old.

Chalamet is also wonderful as Laurie. What I loved was how much he fell for the family here, with Jo being the first focal point. The way the orphan in the wealthy, austere, masculine house gazes at the affectionate, vibrant sisters and Marmee says it all. I also liked that even in background scenes Gerwig took care to have him interact with Beth too, balancing the more obvious interactions in famous scenes with the other three. The adaptation more or less gets all the memorable scenes in.

Dern is stellar as Marmee, too, and looked like she could be the mother of three of the girls. Chris Cooper’s take on Mr Lawrence was charming, and OF COURSE I got choky over the scenes where he’s listening to Beth play and then she goes to thank him for the gift of the piano, having already caught scarlet fever from the Hummels.

But I have casting quibbles. Emma Watson wasn’t as bad as I expected her to be, frankly, as Meg, although I think she was the weakest of the lot. And the moment she comes down the stairs at Sally Gardiner’s party jolted me, and I daresay everyone else, out of the film to think ‘Hermione. Yule Ball.’ The other big one is that Louis Garrel makes for a very French Frederich Bhaer.

Otherwise, as with any adaptation, some moments are dropped or reshaped, but not many, and there’s the sense of a coherent reason for the changes. (John Brooke survives! Plumfield will be a school for girls and boys!) I have a soft spot for the nineties adaptation, because of my age as much as anything, which has things it does better, while there were other aspects this improved upon, but it’s unlikely that I’ll get the film that was playing in my imagination as I first read these books.