How lucky we are to be alive at the same time as Greta Gerwig, who, only two feature films in, has established herself one of our best directors! I wondered how she’d possibly follow Lady Bird, her directorial debut, a knockout combination of sorrow, humor, and pathos. I shouldn’t have worried. Little Women is a stunning achievement, one of the finest movies I’ve ever seen in theaters, narratively expansive and yet sacrificing none of its intimacy or precision.
For those of you that didn’t do the assigned reading in middle school, Little Women is a novel written by Louisa May Alcott, centered on the March family, four sisters and their mother living in Massachusetts during the Civil War. It’s endured the century and a half since its publication, because it’s a great read that you should have done in the first place instead of watching TV, you dang kids, and also because it’s one of the first major English-language novels to seriously posit options for women’s careers besides marriage or madness. Every one of its major players is given a great deal of agency in the world around them, and the romance that is present is never one-sided; proposals of love, and any other event, are all treated as serious decisions made between complex human beings. I know even less about historical literature criticism than I do about movies, though, so suffice it to say if you haven’t read it, you should, and either way, you’ll love the 2019 film adaptation.
The whole package is lovely, but its boldest aspect is the script, an innovative, Jo-rooted, non-chronological rearrangement of major scenes from the novel. In any lesser circles this might have felt desperate or empty, but Gerwig’s guidance, in concert with Nick Houy’s assured editing, helps every scene lend new meaning to every other. The young girls squabbling on Christmas give us insight into the women they eventually become; the women reconvening on their old house let us long for what we’ve seen them leave behind. In one masterful sequence, Gerwig conjures an agonizing gap of time from two companion shots of Jo descending the stairs. It’s clever, but it never becomes preoccupied with its own cleverness, instead showing us the family in its totality. The script also features what potentially my favorite dialogue of any period piece; it employs archaic words and phrasing–many lines are direct quotes from Alcott’s original novel–but allows them deeply modern cadences, and the result is electrifying. Watch the Marches struggle to talk over each other about a neighbor’s party or discuss what to do with an old house, and they’re instantly recognizable as both characters from a past time and as a family you might overhear on the street. This alone would make Little Women a joy to watch; it is far from the only exemplary thing about it.
Adaptations of Little Women have long served as lightning rods for talented actors, as far back as Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor, and the 2019 version is no different. Saoirse Ronan, as per usual, towers over the proceedings, her Jo March slipping from mood to mood but never losing her heart or her unstoppable drive–even when Jo is at her most abject and directionless, you can hear the gears spinning behind her eyes. When she tells a bedridden Beth that God’s will hasn’t met hers, you believe it. Florence Pugh deserves particular praise, too, for lending fan unfavorite Amy a tremendous amount of sympathy, painting her as a young woman less spiteful than she is acutely aware of herself and what it will take for her to advance herself. Even Timothée Chalamet, an actor I’m rarely completely sold on, is well-positioned as Laurie, a young man who has never wanted for anything and is completely unprepared when he does. Every actor, featured or not, lends a striking humanity–Laura Dern’s Marmee laughs through sentences to her daughters, Tracy Letts’ Dashwood has a habit of slamming down pages he’s done reading. Nobody falls into any easy period drama traps; nobody feels like an icon of a bygone era. They may be wearing frocks and waistcoats, but throughout the near-decade sprawl of the story these characters remain immediate and achingly human.
It’s impossible to catalog the full range of excellence on display here, but I’m going to list a few standouts. Yorick Le Saux’s elegant cinematography knows exactly where to place the camera, letting us trace every ill-concealed thought that flickers across Jo’s face, zooming out to let her face down the Massachusetts countryside alone. Alexandre Desplat’s score is pitch-perfect, planting us squarely in the post-war North without feeling antiquated. And most notably, Little Women‘s feminist sensibilities are simultaneously barely spoken and ever-present. The movie is not, textually speaking, about women’s rights, any more than it is about the Civil War, Massachusetts, or painting. There are few lines that read explicitly as rallying cries, and even then, their purpose is generally narrative. Yet we are never let off the hook, never allowed to forget the full scope of the March family’s situation. You can practically feel everything Marmee chokes down as she says “I am angry nearly every day of my life.” Little Women doesn’t want us to forget she’s got every reason to be. (The movie arguably does Alcott’s original ending justice as well, with a brilliant ending device that I won’t spoil here, but allows both Jo and Gerwig to have their cake and eat it too.)
As good as it is, Little Women barely misses perfection. Emma Watson’s valiant efforts do little to lift Meg from her fate as the least interesting March sister, and a handful of moments from the flashback scenes, despite the makeup department’s stellar use of bangs, can still feel like older actors stooping to play younger. These spots are few and far in between, though, and not dealbreakers even when they present themselves; they do little to diminish the breathtaking quality of the film. Much like Lady Bird, every inch of this piece is suffused with emotion in a way that’s easy to miss until it knocks you flat. Little Women is sweeping and accessible, grounded and skybound, and above all an absolute delight to watch. Movies don’t often come this exquisite.
Movies That Are Worse Than “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015) 