Little Women Reviews

Lucy Duckworth (11-1)

I started preparing for Little Women six months before its Christmas Day release. I’m rarely ever this excited about a movie, but I couldn’t believe the cast list: Meryl Streep! Soarise Ronan! Timothee Chalamet! Laura Dern! Emma Watson! I’ve been a huge fan of director and actor, Greta Gerwig, since her solo directorial debut of Ladybird (2017), so I expected big things from the new adaption. Not a week went by last fall without me rattling off the cast list to at least one unsuspecting and uninterested audience.

But before the film Little Women, there was the book. Louisa May Alcott’s classic has been a childhood classic for girls over the last 150 years, myself included. Though I first read it over six years ago, I still can picture its four intelligent, ambitious young female protagonists—Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy—finding their way in a male-dominated world. Much of Little Women focuses on the aspirations and marital prospects of the penniless March sisters, and especially on the writing career of the strong willed, “boyish” Jo. With few jobs open to women, the March sisters can neither just fall in love nor just pursue their ambitions; everything is complicated by the practical importance of “marrying well.” I reread all 739 pages before heading out for the film’s Christmas evening debut, far more excited than was appropriate or necessary.

At first take, so many things were right with the film. I became attached. I cried twice. I looked up the actor who plays Friedrich, Jo’s love interest, immediately after the credits rolled. The cast outdid themselves—powerful monologues by Ronan and Florence Pugh and some excellent sobbing by Dern. Visually, it was stunning, capitalizing on the homey, New England setting to produce the cinematic equivalent of the Bath & Body Works Fall Collection. Gerwig expertly juggles her eight story lines—four characters over two time periods—without confusing the viewer. But as I left the movie theater, the only thing I remember thinking is, “did Gerwig and I read the same book?”

Because for all she’s claimed to have scrutinized the originals, Gerwig took excessive liberties and ultimately warped Alcott’s plot to create a pleasing narrative for 21st century audiences. The novel Little Women, though heralded as a work of female empowerment, is very much still a work of the 19th century. Alcott wrote Little Women in 1868 and 1869, more than 50 years before the 19th amendment, and it falls quite short of today’s norms. Alcott’s male characters are noticeably the most intelligent. Jo founds a school but only for boys. Ironically, Jo does not write her great novel and gives it up for a domestic life she was so determined to evade.

Gerwig’s 2019 version, however, ignores these inconvenient plot twists. We see Jo become this perfect, badass woman. She does it all: writes her novel, opens a school for boys and girls, enjoys single life and, only later, marries when a dreamboat young Professor calls on her (who was significantly older and “not handsome” in the novel). Work hard and realize your dreams, with no tradeoffs.

Though Gerwig’s fantasy certainly befits modern tastes, I feel that an opportunity was missed to highlight not just the difficulty of “having it all” but also Alcott’s own view about the inevitable disappointments of unrealized childhood dreams. Gerwig also neglected an opportunity to comment on how sexism during the time was more than a one-sided, patriarchal oppression; it was entrenched in the mindset of women, too, as evident in Alcott’s own writing. And in ignoring that, I watched Jo on Christmas day become a little too perfect.

If the directing miffed me, the cast more than made up for it. Amy was multidimensional, Jo was heartfelt, and Laurie was distractingly waifish. All three were superbly acted. As for Emma Watson, very few child actors manage to maintain their extraordinary talent into adulthood— and Ms. Watson is no exception. She was not good. She verged on bad. This movie had a 40 million dollar budget, and nobody remembered to tell her to lose the English accent?

Regardless, Little Women was satisfying Christmas Day entertainment, but I was troubled by the inconsistencies with Alcott’s classic. Gerwig’s directing was good, but not outstanding— burdened, perhaps, by a struggle to please both modern audiences as well as the-book-was-better nit-picky critics (like me! :) ). I recently learned that Alcott herself never wanted to write Little Women— she changed it to suit the expectations of her reading audience. Gerwig altered her version to fit her audience, too. It makes me wonder if any woman, or storyteller, for that matter, gets to write what they want. And I wonder if I hadn’t agonized over the original, then maybe I could see Gerwig’s new version for what it is: an empowering message that a woman can, and should, tell whatever story she pleases.

Zack Wray (12-3)

There’s plenty to love about Little Women, Greta Gerwig’s latest film, an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel of the same name. Told out of chronological order, the movie is set in late nineteenth century America, during the Civil War. Our heroine, Jo March (Saorise Ronan), is trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life. The movie skips backwards and forwards in time, leaving the beginning and the end as scattered sections. The time transitions taking place as Jo sleeps are a smart decision, making the movie feel like a montage of memories. The performances were generally well done, although Meryl Streep and Saorise Ronan were especially impressive and convincing.

If Jo wants to succeed, her Aunt March (Meryl Streep) tells her, she must find a wealthy man to marry, and sacrifice any hopes of making it as a writer on her own. Aunt March is perfectly content throughout the film with the status quo, and she tries to instill her values in the three eldest March siblings. She perpetuates the idea among the girls that the only way to move forward in the world is to marry a rich man, validating the idea that women are incapable of making success for themselves. And while it can be only realistic to recognize that there are plenty of barriers to female success in society, Aunt March seems to be fine with those barriers. Streep does an excellent job making March this really nasty relative, who is simultaneously toxic and maternal.

With their father active in the Union cause, Jo and her three sisters live with their mother and their maid in a cozy house in the forest. The women do well on their own, despite living in a world where female independence is frowned upon by patriarchal society. Women still struggle today to be treated the same as men, and although this movie focused entirely on white women, it did generally reflect how difficult it was and still is to realize one’s potential as a woman. And the Marches are by no means poor. However, they do feel poor, and even they, in their upper-middle class status, feel the barrier of sexism and the expectation to conform to gender roles.

The driving force of the movie are these characters who decide to stray from their predefined destinies, and march to their own drumbeat. Jo and Laurie represent those free spirits, who refuse to conform and instead do what they want to do. Yes, Jo gets married, and yes, this goes against her earlier decision to never marry. But the point is that Jo changed her mind to get married by her own free will, she was not coerced or pushed into doing so. Some have argued that this part of the movie is fictitious, and meant to symbolize Alcott’s real-life struggle with a publisher forcing her to marry off Jo for the sake of a more subjectively satisfying narrative. I personally think there’s some merit to that theory, and the jolted way in which the sudden reunification of Jo and her beau unfolds onscreen supports that.

Meanwhile, Laurie, the March’s neighbor, is groomed in his grandfather’s image from the start, with his grandfather hiring a tutor to transform Laurie from a careless teenager into an enterprising gentleman. He flirts with Meg, Amy, and especially Jo, and the way in which his attraction to them is shifting is evidence of his stubbornness and impatience with love. He at one point confesses his love for Jo, but she is not willing nor ready to marry him. This briefly wounds Laurie. Laurie is incredibly privileged, as a man of means. He has the freedom to date whomever he wants, and to just sit around all the time doing whatever. And then, he gets married, in a clever twist, to Amy, the insubordinate sister who Jo fights with most. Laurie marries down, he doesn’t get with Amy for her wealth. Amy represents the idealized woman that Jo tells him he deserves when she rejects his marriage proposal.

Halfway through, I was feeling uneasy about the movie. The time jumps had registered, but I was not yet convinced that the plot or pace were really doing anything for me. I felt like some of the plot was dragging along, and the motivations and actions of characters didn’t feel earned. But by the end of the movie, I was really pleased with the way everything turned out. Loose ends had been resolved, a couple twists here and there. And it felt satisfying, coming out of a movie which doesn’t feel rewarding until the last frame.

Ultimately, this movie is about white women who experience the negative effects that sexism has on womens’ perceived capabilities and responsibilities, as well as the individualized responses to those systemic issues. In a very meta way, Gerwig experienced some of the adversity women regularly experience in the arts when she was recently excluded from an Oscar nomination in the Best Director category, despite Little Women being nominated in numerous other categories. I recommend this movie, it’s a thoughtful and well-crafted story, with satisfying execution and thought-provoking themes.