It’s odd to begin a review of a movie based on a work as familiar as “Little Women” with a warning about spoilers, but one of the most original inspirations that Greta Gerwig, as writer and director, brings to her adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel is a conceit that needs to be revealed in order to make sense of the movie at all. Namely, in Gerwig’s thrillingly bold reconfiguration of “Little Women,” the writing of the novel is built into the story—and the author isn’t Alcott but the novel’s protagonist, Jo March (played by Saoirse Ronan).
In this way, Gerwig’s “Little Women” is the tale of the birth of an artist—a female artist at a time that’s hostile to women and the telling of stories of women’s lives from women’s point of view. In short, a time very much like today in Hollywood. In addition to the path of a woman in the world of movie-making, Gerwig inscribes another personal theme: the relationship of an artist to her family. Like Gerwig’s film, “Lady Bird,” from 2017, her version of “Little Women” is about a free-spirited young woman whose ambitions threaten to detach her from her financially struggling family, and who discovers that her intellectual self-fulfillment and emotional development are inseparable from her devotion to her family.
In pursuing these themes, Gerwig faces a distinctive problem—one that she also confronted in “Lady Bird.” Gerwig is one of the most original actors of her time; now, she’s directing movies that evoke her own experience, but she doesn’t have actors similar to herself to portray characters who are like herself. Ronan displays, in both movies, conspicuous skill and admirable precision—but not the spontaneity, the creative imagination, the impulsivity that Gerwig herself displays onscreen. Ronan becomes a vessel for characters endowed with Gerwig’s creative fire, but not for the fire itself. (It’s unclear whether this is due to the nature of her own art or to its interface with Gerwig’s direction.) As a result, Ronan is not a powerful presence as Jo March: the character, famous for her anger, for her “temper,” comes off as unduly moderate, both inwardly and outwardly—not in conflict with herself, not repressing that rage, but merely claiming one that’s hardly in danger of bursting forth.
It is, however, a professional performance delivered by a very experienced actor who’s also a star—and what it means to be a professional artist is itself is crucial to the story that Gerwig is telling. The awakening of Jo’s literary vocation is pulled taut by two apparently conflicting desires: making a good living from one’s art, and relying on that art as a mode of personal expression. Gerwig makes that tension the central one of her film. Jo’s friendship, in New York, with Friedrich Bhaer, a German philosopher (played by the French actor Louis Garrel), provides the hinge that brings the two parts of her drive together. As in the novel, the philosopher looks with dismay at the lurid romances that Jo writes and sells. In Gerwig’s movie, he encourages her to write from life, to write her experiences realistically and sincerely—and, when she responds that she needs to make a living from her writing and doesn’t want to doom herself to a life of penury with books that won’t sell, Bhaer counters, “Shakespeare was the greatest poet who ever lived because he smuggled his poetry in popular works.”
“Little Women” is just such a work of poetic smuggling: a movie made within the norms of the industry that also reflects Gerwig’s own personal artistic ideas, ideals, and obsessions. The spectre that hangs over Jo’s literary ambition is bohemianism—the rejection of the settled domestic life and its morality in favor of being independent and unmoored, freethinking, and, above all, poor. The poverty of the March family is what Jo originally hoped to remedy by selling her writing. The threat of alienation, isolation, and poverty also runs through Gerwig’s career. In the lead role of “Frances Ha,” which she co-wrote with its director, Noah Baumbach, the aspiring dancer and choreographer ends up homeless and alone before fulfilling her artistic dreams—and the movie makes clear that realizing those dreams and putting one’s life on a more stable footing are inseparable—even if it elides the practicalities by which Frances gets from desperate isolation to a modicum of success. (“Mistress America,” which she also wrote with Baumbach, depicts the disruption of relationships resulting from a writer writing about people close to her.) In “Little Women,” Gerwig powerfully, explicitly, and self-consciously puts in the practicalities, showing the decisions and events that lead to Jo becoming a successful author.
It’s also possible to view “Little Women” as a comment on the making of “Lady Bird”—the transformation of personal experience and a distinctive family background into art, and, what’s more, into popular art. Gerwig dramatizes the obliviousness of a male editor to what would interest female readers (Jo’s novel “Little Women” is rescued from his indifference only through a fortunate coincidence) and the compromises that Jo has to make with the book in order to render it marketable and commercial: the depiction of the marriage of Jo and Friedrich, a distortion introduced purely to increase sales potential. Gerwig’s vision of this ending is wickedly ironic. And, in the present-day context of a movie about “Little Women,” the marriage plot is not what sells. Rather, it’s Gerwig’s over-all conceit of Jo becoming a successful professional artist that simultaneously expresses Gerwig’s personal artistic commitment, meshes with the spirit of the age and fulfills the desires and expectations of modern viewers. (This view of professionalism itself also crystallizes a trend that’s in the air, in the current age of artistic precarity—the view of an artist deferring to conventions and norms in pursuit of success not as a moral compromise or a self-betrayal but as a mode of self-assertion, self-validation, and self-expression.)
The expansive and imaginative power of Gerwig’s writing isn’t limited to the rearrangement of events from the book—though it starts there. The very intricacy of the mosaic-like structure is a declaration from the outset that there’s nothing simple or inevitable about the paths and details of these women’s lives. Gerwig also reconfigures dialogue drastically and originally in order to embody her own passionately analytical view of the story’s era: women’s lack of civil rights, the legal constraints placed on women by marriage, the narrow range of options that American society offered to women at the time, the obstacles faced then (as now) by women in the arts, and even a gleam of classic-Hollywood obnoxiousness, in a line of dialogue delivered by Aunt March that’s borrowed from the arrogant yet phonogenic producer Samuel Goldwyn: “I may not always be right, but I’m never wrong.”
Oddly, when Jo watches her book be manufactured—from typesetting to binding to the gold-leaf embossing of her name on the cover—the passivity of her observation suggests a sort of hands-off artistry, a professional restraint, that’s reflected in the movie itself. Gerwig balances major artistic risks—the intricate, non-chronological structure, above all—with the casting of actors, especially Ronan and Timothée Chalamet, as Laurie, whose charming and amiable moderation renders the story altogether more endearing, less roiled, less troubling. (Florence Pugh’s performance as Amy comes closest to embodying the passion that the story evokes.) It’s easy to imagine, for instance, how a more fiercely determined performer, such as Brie Larson, would render Jo’s scenes with Marmee, as played, with controlled intensity, by Laura Dern, and with Aunt March, played with cantankerous candor by Meryl Streep, all the more combustible.
As with “Lady Bird,” Gerwig’s direction, less daring and original than her writing, is revealed only in occasional flashes. There, they were found in documentary-centric elements. Here, they’re largely interstitial, a sort of imaginative cinematic punctuation of sequences, by means of glances and gazes, that also reflects a quasi-documentary ardor for settings and their influence on characters’ thought and action. Such grace notes—as when Mr. Laurence, perched at his window, watches Beth (Eliza Scanlen) leave the March house, then descends a staircase while listening to her play his piano, and when Jo, at a window in the ailing Beth’s room, observes Meg (Emma Watson) and her husband, John (James Norton), embracing in the yard below—connect disparate places and events and convey a sense of a large dramatic space that’s filled with emotional energy. Other moments of variety, including the occasional direct address of characters reciting the text of their letters into the camera (evoking the novel’s own epistolary interpolations), do not so much break the fourth wall dramatically as indicate Gerwig’s own acknowledgment of a world of directorial invention and audacity lying just beyond the horizon of this movie. Most of “Little Women” holds such imaginative directorial power in reserve, in order to put actors and their acting in the foreground.
Both “Little Women” and “Lady Bird,” accomplished and personal, distinctive and moving as they are, pose the same question: when does an artist cut loose? With the power granted to the artist who achieves popularity, when does it become freedom? Is there a lost paradise of the uninhibited that professional life can recover? This, too, is another of Gerwig’s bitter ironies. Near the end of “Little Women,” Jo’s recollection of a theatrical game that she played with her sisters when they were little—a memory that arises as she’s clutching her first copy of her novel, straight from the binder’s hand—suggests that this carefree time, without responsibilities, is also one of irresponsibility; that childlikeness is also childishness; and that adulthood and maturity in art is a matter of renunciation.
