Little Women (Dir Greta Gerwig, 2h 5m)

Having been the source material for six previous screen adaptions, including such illustrious actresses as Elizabeth Taylor and Katherine Hepburn, with the previous released only last year to mixed reviews, not to mention several television and animated adaptions, one could certainly question what new can be brought to Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Certainly, the tale of the trials and tribulations of four creative woman against the backdrop of the American Civil War and its aftermath has been classical Americana since the novel was published in 1868. In the hands of Greta Gerwig, it takes on a whole new quality, not often explored in previous adaptions, despite it being a key tenant of the original novel, as it focuses on the plight of the female creator, as much of her work has come to focus on, in the figure of Saoirse Ronan's Jo.

What it undoubtedly shares with most adaptions is lavish production values-there is a painterly quality of a number of the key shots in this film, whilst the home that Jo and her family share, together with that of neighbouring well to do Mr Lawrence and his grandson, Theodore (Timothée Chalamet), and the New York that Jo eventually finds refuge in, have a nigh-perfect period detail, together with the costumes for all the cast-even when compared to the most recent period adaption (2018's version being a reasonably faithful modernisation), there is a degree of care, of visual imagination, and of excellent visual story telling. Nowhere is this seen better than in the bold choice of essentially playing back and forth with the idea of memory, with scenes repeating themselves with different, and in one case, devastating results.

Much of this is tied to Gerwig's form of telling the story itself-where most adaptions start with the March family dealing with the loss of their patriach to the Civil War where he is serving as a pastor, and the difficulty of dealing with Christmas as a family without him, and encroaching poverty, so Gerwig begins with the much later scenes of setting the scattered sisters up individually, from Jo selling work to a New York newspaper to Amy (Florence Pugh) following her passions of being a painter in Paris, to the domesticity that oldest sister Meg (Emma Watson) has chosen for herself. It's remarkably daring, but it pays off in bucketloads-in its non-linear narrative, often cutting back and forth between interlinked events, so we get stronger thematic links-the past has clearly changed each of our heroines from the lively and closeknit group we see a few scenes into the film in the first flashback, and the film spends much of the next two hours unravelling this.

Together with this more modern sense of story-telling is a degree more modern an approach in the plot-Meg, in particular, previously the target of literary critics who criticise her arc as sentimental at best, quaintly old-fashioned and against the grain compared to her sisters, is here a well-wrought character, with Watson imbuing her with just as much a sense of independence as her sisters. Her choice to become a wife, to lay aside her acting talent, is seen as an act of frewill, rather than a kowtowing to her husband to be, and with Watson giving perhaps a career-best performance in this role, as a supportive sister, wife, and mother, so Meg is every bit as important a character as Jo-there is no sense of costume drama stiffness throughout this film, and even in its most traditional characters and moments, Gerwig adds a modern sense of feminism and female self-empowerment.

Nowhere is this seen better than in Jo herself. Whilst her character may well be a retread of Gerwig's last collaboration with Ronan, in the form of the artistic, if poor, Lady Bird, in her attempts to be a writer without fearing the negative effects of being a female writer-at points, the film lends her a sense of vulnerability, the camera often lingering on her face, or, as it does several times, on her as a small figure against the landscape. Even when trying to sell her work-where, indeed, the film rests heaviest upon the real life Alcott, whose childhood is an undeniable autobiographical part of the original story-she is told her work, too full of sentiment at the close of the civil war, is not good enough, or simply will not sell in the embittered America

But more simply, Jo's journey through the film is that of love, loss and acceptance that essentially becomes the basis for her own creative works-but for a few scenes, she is largely our point of view, and even if the story is told more emotively than sequentially, it is through these experiences that she grows as a young woman, through her relationship with her sisters, and with Theodore, and her eventual husband and lover, the one critical force in her life up to this point, the German professor Friedrich, who tells her that she is capable of creating more than the lurid narratives she has managed to publish up till then, until she returns to her former publisher more resourceful and keenly aware of the value of her work.

At the centre of the film, for all four girls, creativity, whether simply pastime for Meg and Beth, passion, in the case of Amy, who follows her interest in painting to France, together with aunt Flo (a wonderfully ascerbic Meryl Streep), or, as in the case of Jo, an income and a way to become self-sufficient, is seen as escapism. We see the quartet put on plays for small audiences, busy themselves with the work of creativity as much to escape poverty, even for an afternoon, into a make-believe world where they are all rich and famous artists, as much as for their own enjoyment. Whilst the film is an impressively feminist take on the work, even given its focus on self-sufficient young women representing the best of what America at that period had to offer, there is something bittersweet, particularly in the case of the doomed Beth and the married Meg, of this creativity being put aside in favour of the domestic against which Jo and particularly Amy, rile against-that Gerwig keeps all of this in play at the same time is impressive, and something that the non-chronological structure only aids.


Yet, what Little Women does most successfully is to marry a work written scant years after the Civil War with a remarkably modern and current approach, without once affecting the timeless sense of the film and its setting. Whilst it may not have the immediacy, the perfectly captured schism in America of the early 2000s, crystallised in its artistic and principled protagonist, with which, undeniably, Jo shares more than an actress, Little Women is an undeniable classic, and ends the decade that Greta Gerwig achieved mainstream successs, bringing the fiercely independent, female-led, female directed movie in from the cold, in fine style.

Rating: Highly Recommended