The New Little Women

Greta Gerwig’s Little Women had received rapturous reviews well before it opened on Christmas day. "Warm but never wishy-washy . . . Gerwig is the real deal . . . the March sisters remain delightfully full of spunk . . . (the film) has a great collective vitality . . ."

Exiting the theater a few weeks ago after an early screening, I heard similar comments from the audience.

“I absolutely loved it,” one man said.

“I was weeping all the way through it,” several other people said.

Gerwig’s film is the sixth cinematic version of the much-loved moralistic, sentimental, at times tear-jerky novel that has been continuously in print since its publication 150 years ago. However, Gerwig scrambles Little Women’s lengthy two-part, 500-plus-page chronological story into a narrative that makes for a different viewing experience. It’s no longer a coming of age saga as much as it is a family story.

Gerwig begins with what is nominally the book’s part 2, (Good Wives), when the four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, are adults. The oldest sister, Meg, (Emma Watson), is already married to her penniless but devoted husband and is the mostly happy mother of twins. Amy, the youngest sister, is touring Europe with her wealthy Aunt March, played by an ancient-looking Meryl Streep, at her acerbic best; Amy is seen painting in Paris and about to be courted by her older sister Jo’s castoff lover Laurie.

At last Gerwig introduces Jo, the second oldest March sister, budding author, and the character most readers, including Gerwig, have taken to be based on the novel's author, Louisa May Alcott. At the center of the story, it is Jo who primarily accounts for the book's lasting popularity. (According to Anne Boyd Rioux's Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why it Still Matters, generations of women around the world, from Gloria Vanderbilt to Hillary Clinton, have been inspired by Jo March, to follow in Jo's writerly footsteps.)

Jo's staying power is more amazing considering that despite being a talented, brainy, and vibrant woman, she repeatedly voices her unhappiness at having been born a woman instead of a man. All four March sisters in the novel, which is set during and after the Civil War, struggle to fashion lives that are emotionally fulfilling despite the gender, aesthetic and financial constraints of their day. Their surprising contemporaneous feel make these constraints another major source of the story's continuing appeal. They differ not that much from those that even today make women, especially those of limited financial means in a still mostly male dominated world, struggle to balance between focusing on their looks, their minds and their yearning for a happy marriage - the competing pulls of career versus home life.

Unlike Alcott, who by choice remained single and devoted herself to her writing in order to earn enough money to support her family, the author was forced by her publisher to have Jo marry at the end.

At the start of the film, Jo is living in New York and has already met her unlikely husband-to-be, Professor Bhaer, here played by young French film heartthrob, Louis Garrel. In her opening scene, Jo is in the process of selling one of her early racy stories to the publisher of a newspaper for $20. The publisher—the always perfect Tracy Letts—cuts radically from his new author’s lengthy manuscript, telling her to “keep it short and spicy,” then adds: “If you’re writing about a woman, make sure she is married or dead at the end.”

Following this less than welcome advice, Jo races down the street toward her boarding house home in a scene that calls to mind Gerwig’s earlier film Frances Ha. After several more scenes of the adult sisters, the film jumps back seven years earlier, to their childhood home in Concord, Massachusetts. We now get the first formal encounter with Laurie, the handsome, wealthy, motherless boy next door, at a ball.

From then, the film continues to skip back and forth in time, so it’s often hard to know what stage of life the girls are actually in. Some viewers told me they found the jumbled narrative confusing. Thanks to my familiarity with the story, I found the scrambled chronology anxiety-provoking. I kept fearing lest one or another key scene be omitted. Eventually, as in Winona Ryder's 1994 Little Women, and Masterpiece Theater's three-hour 2017 TV version, starring Maya Hawke (daughter of Uma thurman and Ethan Hawke), Gerwig does include the most memorable scenes. These range from Jo and Meg’s trip to the theater with Laurie, to Amy's burning Jo’s novel in revenge for being left out, to Amy’s falling through the ice, and her later brutal punishment at school for drawing a less than flattering picture of her teacher. Throughout we glimpse Jo writing at her desk, and the four sisters acting scenes in plays written by Jo, later joined by Laurie in their performances.

The scenery and costumes are gorgeous, as has been true of all prior Little Women films. My companion, however, noticed that the sisters did not seem to be truly poverty-stricken. Given the dress style of the times, which make even the sisters’ hand-stitched long gowns look luxurious compared to our informally blue-jean-and-tee-shirt–clad population, such an impression is understandable.

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Alcott actually portrays the fictional March family in a rosier light than their real-life, often destitute counterparts. She shows the Marches living in genteel poverty with a single devoted maid, in a small but hardly threadbare house. But true to the book, all the sisters are shown working for a living, very concerned with making their own money to survive.

I found myself fixating on minor details like the characters’ hair color and style. “Jo’s blonde!” I thought on first glimpsing Saoirse Ronan, Gerwig’s muse at this point, but then most of the characters were blonde or blond-ish. Nowhere to be seen is the glossy chestnut mane—Jo’s “one beauty,” of which she and the rest of the family are so proud.

But Amy, the blondest, prettiest and vainest daughter in the book, played here by Florence Pugh, wore her hair constantly in bangs and braids, or pinned high on her head, so her famous blond curls never make an appearance. No matter the hair style, I didn’t find Pugh either blonde or beautiful enough to make her a very convincing Amy. Worse, I found Pugh's adult Amy's air of aggrieved haughty petulance off-putting, even if a few actual curls might have helped a little.

Many reviewers have gushed over Gerwig’s choice of curly-haired Timothee Chalamet as perfection—the ultimate Laurie. But chacun a son gout (each to one’s own taste). I found Chalamet just not my type. He strikes me as too pretty—dare I say, too androgynous-looking? The previous Lauries, Christian Bale, opposite Winona Ryder in 1994, and Masterpiece Theater's Jonah Hauer-King, were more my style. For that matter, I’ve always thought Peter Lawford —who played opposite June Allison in Mervyn LeRoy"s 1949 Little Women —was about as great a Laurie as need be.

The rest of the cast sparkles throughout. Laura Dern, superb in everything, makes a convincing Marmee, though far from the plump, motherly looking woman of the book, while the rest of the men, starting with Chris Cooper as Laurie’s grandfather, are all great, as were their predecessors in earlier versions of the film.

My companion, who was completely new to the story, said “Jo should have accepted Laurie's proposal the first time he asked her. She wasn’t going to get a second chance, and she was full of regret, because he married her sister. Pretty stupid.”

Actually, in the novel, and in most movie versions, Jo does not admit to having second thoughts about her inability to love Laurie as he loved her. She does, however, confess that if he’d asked her again she night have said yes because she now cares more about "being loved".

In the book, as well as in the two early films, Jo hears that Laurie and Amy have fallen in love, and when they return home, she knows they have actually wed and is happily resigned to the situation. In the Masterpiece Theater version, the family all know of Laurie’s love for Amy. But all are surprised to learn of the actual wedding. In the Winona Ryder film, however, the romance and wedding both come as a total surprise.

Gerwig makes more of Jo’s second thoughts. We see her write and mail a letter to Laurie and we later see her rush to retrieve the letter before he can find it.

And in Gerwig’s film, Laurie’s wedding also comes to Jo as a surprise.

For all its accolades before and after its Christmas opening, Gerwig’s Little Women has faced challenges. Its box office has yet to be all that was hoped, men have been said to have shunned it, and it’s been snubbed by the Golden Globes and other pre-Oscar award nominations. I myself, despite several viewings, continued to have trouble with the chopped-up chronology. The two scenes of Beth’s illnesses—the first when she recovers, and the second when she dies—occur so close in time that I had to depend on Jo’s hairstyles to tell which was which. It's short when Beth first gets scarlet fever, long when Beth has a relapse and dies.

Similarly, the final scene, in which Jo is shown back at her publisher, haggling over the copyright to her book that will soon become the very story we are watching, takes place confusingly right in the middle of a hectic climax —not in the novel. This occurs when Jo and her family are in the midst of racing by carriage to the train station to intercept Professor Bhaer and detain him long enough for him and Jo to declare their mutual love.

Gerwig has drawn from Alcott’s other writing as well as the novel in her script, and she is more explicit than her cinematic predecessors about her identification with Alcott. The director shows her feminist perspective by having Jo herself take responsibility for Little Women"s publication, rather than, as in earlier versions, having Jo hand over this task to Professor Bhaer. But even in this, Gerwig is not completely original. In her third and last sequel to Little Women, Jo’s Boys, Jo actually becomes a famous writer - of, we assume, Little Women. She finally earns enough money to support her family; she becomes so famous that she has to hide from adoring fans.

In the end, with all her juggling of time, and her more feminist leanings, Gerwig has made another interesting, if not necessarily definitive, version of a still timeless family story.