Composing herself, and pausing to gather her wits, Jo March (Saoirse Ronan) waits at the door of an office. Then she takes the plunge and enters a world of men. She has come to see a newspaper editor named Dashwood (Tracy Letts), hoping to sell him a story. She claims to be a go-between, bringing the work of a friend, but a glance at Jo’s inky fingers proclaims her as the author. As Dashwood takes the manuscript and crosses out page after page, her spirits droop, whereupon he confounds her by accepting the tale for publication. Such is Jo’s delight that, on leaving the office, she doesn’t—or can’t—walk home in a manner befitting a young lady. She runs.
So begins “Little Women,” a new adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel. The writer and director is Greta Gerwig, and, if you reckon that movies have muscle memories, cast your mind back to Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha” (2012), in which Gerwig, as the heroine, hared along the streets of New York. The rhetoric of liberation, however grand, is no match for the liberated act, however fleeting, and Jo, you could argue, is best understood in motion. Alcott claimed, of her own youth, that she “fell with a crash into girlhood,” and movies, let’s face it, are made for crashing. When I think of Katharine Hepburn’s Jo, in George Cukor’s delectable “Little Women” of 1933, what I remember is not her chatter, as raucous as a raven, but her impromptu fencing match in a drawing room, or the galumphing rumpus she makes when, at her mother’s call, she clatters down the stairs.
Ronan is less loud than Hepburn, but she has inherited some of her hustle and bustle, and anyone who admired Ronan in the title role of Gerwig’s “Lady Bird” (2017) will note a similar fixity of purpose in her portrayal of Jo. Also, when she appears within the same frame as Laura Dern, who plays Marmee, they genuinely look like mother and daughter, with their long, grave features, and you can see Marmee wondering, as every parent does: If I spy so much of myself in my child, is that cause for hope or fear? They sit together on the floor, at night, with Jo lamenting an earlier flare of hot temper. Marmee is unsurprised:
“You remind me of myself.”
“But you’re never angry.”
“I’m angry nearly every day of my life.”
This exchange is taken, almost verbatim, from the book—one of those raw and startling moments which cast a shadow of perplexity on its reputation for sweetness and light. Fury, Alcott tells us, is an inherited trait; Marmee reveals that she was schooled by her mother, long ago, in what we would call anger management, and hopes that Jo, in turn, will master her own wrath. What emerges from Gerwig’s movie, though, is a strong sense, such as Alcott would not have dared to admit, that indignation is not just the natural lot of women but their rousing right. In a war-wearied society, as in the tight embrace of the Marches, there is much to be angry about. It’s one thing to be a little woman because you are not yet grown; quite another to be belittled by the larger world.
The difficult matter of that growth, and of how best to represent it in the short span of a movie, has tested everyone who has sought to wrestle Alcott’s novel onto the screen. Amy, the youngest of the sisters, is especially tricky, since she has to progress from the age of twelve or so (a precocious twelve, but still) to the status of a wife. In Mervyn LeRoy’s effort, of 1949, Amy was quietly promoted to the rank of second youngest—a wise precaution, perhaps, given that she was played by Elizabeth Taylor. In the more intense retelling of 1994, directed by Gillian Armstrong, the character was split into two, with Kirsten Dunst handing over to Samantha Mathis once the curtain came down on Amy’s childhood.
In the latest film, she is played by Florence Pugh, whose star, from “Lady Macbeth” (2016) to “Midsommar” (2019), has continued to rocket. (Next spring, she will battle through “Black Widow,” as Scarlett Johansson’s sister. A slight change of tone from the Marches.) Pugh is twenty-three but seems older, with her frightening poise and the pass-me-a-smoke throatiness of her voice, and while the innocence of Amy, equipped with long blond braids, is a stretch for her, the willful tenacity presents no problem. So urgent, indeed, is the thirst for experience that rages in Ronan and Pugh, under Gerwig’s command, that the other actors who complete the March quartet—Emma Watson as Meg, and Eliza Scanlen as the vulnerable Beth—are doomed to make less of an impression.
That is never an issue for Meryl Streep, and she is on suitably beady form as Aunt March, who believes that a propitious marriage to a man of means remains, like it or not, the most reliable way in which a gentlewoman can survive and thrive. Being Streep, though, she manages to hint—with a gleam in her penetrating gaze, and a clairvoyance that Alcott, again, would scarcely have allowed herself—that an alternative state of affairs, in a less tightly laced future, may prove worthy of deliberation. Not that Aunt March will live to see it.
Some viewers, I suspect, will be saggy with foreboding, like reluctant guests (“Must we meet the Marches, again?”), as they wend their way to “Little Women” over the festive period. Yet wend they will, because the saga of Jo and the gang will simply not release its grip, so crowded and occasionally so unbearable are the emotions packed into this plain tale. The new film may be the umpteenth dramatization of the book, but so what? I’m already looking forward to ump plus one.
Every version has its virtues. It’s sobering to reflect that Cukor’s “Little Women” is nearer in time to the Civil War than it is to us; it could conceivably have been seen by an eighty-year-old whose father had died in the conflict, and the ghost of loss and frailty seems to dawdle on the fringes of the merriment. No less wrenching is the sight of Margaret O’Brien, the Beth of the 1949 movie, setting off to thank a rich old man for the gift of his piano; with her starched frock, and her solemn demeanor strangely close to tears, she could be Alice in Wonderland, and the whole film, robed in Technicolor, retains a picture-book enchantment.
Gerwig’s innovations are something else. The costumes, designed by Jacqueline Durran, are a triumph of the homespun: a plausible patchwork of things borrowed, mended, or handed down. Jo, scribbling in the attic, has clearly raided a drawer in a rush, wanting only to be warm. And, if there’s a National Waistcoat League, this movie could be its mascot; nifty examples are sported by Jo, Laurie (Timothée Chalamet), the handsome neighbor whom she loves so dearly that she doesn’t need to marry him, and his sad grandfather (Chris Cooper), whose mansion lies within strolling distance of the March household. As for Professor Bhaer (Louis Garrel), whom Jo finds as her fellow-lodger when she moves to New York, I’m afraid that I failed to notice his waistcoats, so charmed was I by the audacity of the casting. On the page, he is a porky middle-aged German. (Laurie says, “I consider him a trump, in the fullest sense of that expressive word.” Yikes!) In the film, he becomes an ardent French smolderer. It’s like ordering bratwurst and getting coq au vin.
But Gerwig’s coup is chronological: to and fro she darts across the years, chopping the plot into flashbacks and flash-forwards, and keeping us on our toes. (The darting is easier to follow on a second viewing.) The results can be alarming, as weddings adjoin funerals and tantrums melt into firelit peace, but what the mixture yields is a kind of creed: a faith in the fullness of lives that might be deemed unexceptional. The movie’s outward gaze is radical, no question, yet it refuses to scorn the comforts—of ingrained habits, and of home—that are honored by the conservative imagination. Such equipoise is almost as rare in cinema as it is, God knows, in politics, and right now, though we can’t foretell whether time will be cruel or kind to Gerwig’s “Little Women,” it may just be the best film yet made by an American woman.
As with all good Americana, violence is never far away. This is a family flick, with a PG rating, but many a pinch and a punch are delivered by the March clan (“I really did want to hurt you,” Amy says to Jo, who forbade her a trip to the theatre), and Jo, offered an arm by Laurie as they take the air, responds with a manly thwack. Whether such blows are landed in Alcott’s text is hardly the point, for this is not only a film of the book but also, more stirring still, a film about the book. What Jo ends up producing, for the demanding Dashwood, is a summation of all that we have observed; she writes the film into being, so to speak, mothering the facts and the multiple fates of her loved ones into fiction. At the climax, we see the story being printed, stitched, bound in leather, and handed to Jo, as if she, not Alcott, were the author of “Little Women.” She stands there smiling, her restlessness finally quelled—proud, content, composed. ♦
