Director
Greta Gerwig re-engages with Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel in this fresh
and thoughtful adaptation. (Review: Patrick Compton 9/10).
There have been about 20 adaptations of Little Women in various guises over the
last 150 years, in the cinema, theatre and even opera house. In the light of
this it is fair to ask whether Greta Gerwig’s new film is strictly necessary.
I am no expert on the Little Women industry, but Gerwig’s adaptation seems to me to break
new ground. Firstly she splices two timelines together in a mesh of flashbacks
so that we experience the characters in their maturity as well as their youth.
This runs the risk of confusing the viewer, but I found this approach not only
added a sense of depth to the character narrative but also offered the balm of
clarity.
Secondly, Gerwig brilliantly engages with
the issue of the status of women in the United States during and immediately
after the Civil War (the war took place between 1861-5, but the narrative
stretches well into the 1870s).
This matter is starkly captured in the
first scene when Jo March (Saoirse Ronan), the central character, first
presents her work for publication. The bewhiskered publisher insists that
whatever she writes, her heroine’s life story must end in love and marriage.
It is Jo’s rebellion against the seeming
inevitability of this platitude that forms one of film’s biggest tensions.
Given that Alcott never married and that Jo is her alter-ego, the movie
attempts to accommodate both the writer’s feminist vision that women can have a
greater life ambition (in this case being a productive artist) and the
contrasting reality that a book that excludes such a conventional “happy
ending” will not make money.
The solution that Gerwig chooses is
fascinating. In both the book and the largely faithful film, Jo rejects the
passionate marriage proposal of the man everyone wanted her to end up with,
Laurie (Timothee Chalamet), and she runs the risk of becoming a literary
spinster.
As we all know, however, Jo reluctantly
accepts that marriage is an “economic prospect” and marries off her heroine to
an academic, but the actor who plays him is not some dry stick but the
thoroughly dishy Louis Garrel.
This romantic ending, however, is played in
a meta-fictional way, as if the movie is portraying the author’s somewhat
reluctant concession to the realities of book publishing at the time. The real
ending, Gerwig suggests, comes afterwards in the film’s final shot when we see
Jo behind a glass panel watching with growing excitement as her book is bound
and embossed. This, we are led to believe, is her proper happy ending.
Aside from these issues, lovers of the
novel will find much to engage them in this movie. I was particularly struck by
the sense of joy that Gerwig – and of course her stellar cast – bring to the
youthful family scenes in Massachusetts as a Unionist family await the return
of their father from war duty.
Aside from the exquisite Ronan, who
captures Jo’s headstrong character perfectly, Florence Pugh is convincing as
the strong, hot-headed Amy, while Emma Watson is just right as the more
conventional older sister, Meg. Eliza Scanlen plays the delicate, gentle Beth
with a poignant sense of what might have been without the onset of illness.
Jo remarks mournfully at one stage that she
is devastated by the fact that her childhood is over and it is a mark of
Gerwig’s film that the audience feels this emotion with equal intensity as the
girls branch out into the world.
There is plenty more to enjoy. Little Women also works as a marriage
comedy and a sibling rivalry drama, while the notion of romance and – yes –
happy endings are also given space.
There is even room for another of Meryl
Streep’s brilliant cameos as the cantankerous Aunt March while Laura Dern plays
Marmie with a gentle strength that envelops her family in a cloud of love.
Little
Women is showing at Gateway Mall, Ballito Junction,
Midlands Mall, The Pavilion, Suncoast and Watercrest Mall. Patrick Compton
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