In the new film “Little Women,” the main character Jo March delivers this cry from the heart:
“Women, they have minds and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. And I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for, I’m so sick of it!”
March’s plaint could have been prompted by the constraints of her day, namely 1860’s New England. Or it could have been prompted by March’s publisher, who says in one of the scenes that he might be interested in publishing her novel, but only if the girl in it gets married by the end. “She needs to be married, or dead. Either one.” Otherwise, he insists, no one will want to buy it…starting with him.
Our heroine manages to sell her book, of course, and “Little Women,” by real-life Louisa May Alcott, remains a best-seller to this day. Now, director Greta Gerwig has come along and managed to bring the women, and their world, convincingly to cinematic life.
Gerwig somehow takes characters, and words, that are more than 100 years old (closer to 150, really) and have them speak and act entirely believably. What’s more, she has somehow managed to put them in scenes and clothing that remain authentic to their era — America during the Civil War— without drawing attention as either forced or phony.
As further evidence of Gerwig’s directorial prowess, I give you the first several minutes of the film. They seem to be one constant whirl of motion, but I realized later that some of the whirls was from the characters’ motion — starting with Jo, who runs through city streets in euphoria after selling her first piece of writing — while other scenes owe their momentum to the camera moving through the humble abode, showing the sisters tumbling and teasing each other in good-hearted exuberance. Technically, that sort of matching is hard to achieve. It served the story by pulling me in immediately while leaving no doubt that Jo March — the character Alcott created as a version of herself — will be the central character.
Gerwig’s casting is almost as successful. Saoirse (“sor-sha”) Ronan is completely convincing as Jo, the second oldest of the four March girls. Laura Dern is likewise completely grounded as their long-suffering mother who keeps the family going through long New England winters while their father is away, serving as a chaplain in the Civil War.
However, I’m afraid I did not buy Emma Watson as oldest sister Meg, who aspires only to married domesticity. Instead, I kept wondering “Why is Hermione from Hogwarts in this movie? And how is she marrying Janes Norton, who’s a vicar in the PBS series “Grantchester”?
Another weakness is Gerwig’s penchant for leaping back and forth in the story, across seven pivotal years in this family’s life. She may have done this for fear that too many people knew the book, but I’m afraid she lost me. She needed something more obvious to show that flashbacks had been triggered, for me to follow along.
Nevertheless, I consider this film a great success.
Near the end of the film, Jo tells her sisters about her new novel, the one that will become “Little Women.” She’s worried that no one will really care about the domestic joys and struggles of a group of sisters, because “Writing doesn’t confer importance; it reflects it.”
Sister Amy disagrees: “Writing things is what makes them important.”
Why this story? Well, why any story? Isn’t a story of life and death, love and heartbreak, at least as important as imaginary non-humans annihilating one another across imaginary galaxies?
When I first read the novel “Little Women,” I was upset. I was angry about the limited range of choices the girls in the story gave themselves, and I blamed the author for that.
It never crossed my mind that it may simply have been an accurate depiction of those times.
Now I have to wonder: are we doing so much better, today?
Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” somehow manages to thread the needle of all these choices. It’s a tale with both head and heart, ambition and beauty; and it’s something that big and little women…and men! … would do well to see.
