A few weeks ago, I wrote about my thoughts on rewatching the 1994 movie adaptation of Little Women. Over the holidays, I had the chance to watch the new version directed by Greta Gerwig. It came out to overwhelmingly positive reviews, good word of mouth, and solid box office. I was fully sold on it before walking into the theatre because I adore both Saoirse Ronan (Jo) and Timothee Chalamet (Laurie) and, of course, love the story. Well, I walked out with mixed feelings about the movie. I wasn’t planning to write about them (because I did enjoy the movie a lot and it didn’t seem worthwhile to focus on the quibbles) until someone on IG asked me to share my thoughts. I guess this does serve as a bookend to my previous post, so here we are. Read on and feel free to disagree in the comments.
First up, the good stuff. The cast is, for the most part, absolutely fantastic. In many cases, I would say they’re an improvement even over the 1994 version (which was superbly acted). Off the top of my head, Professor Baer is infinitely better cast here, as is Aunt March. Old Mr. Laurence is wonderful. Florence Pugh as adult Amy is amazing, far better than Samantha Mathis. Timmy Chalamet was perfect as young Laurie, though I feel that Christian Bale looked more age-appropriate for older Laurie. Saoirse was phenomenal, no less great than Winona Ryder.
The main exception? Emma Watson. I am, admittedly, biased because I don’t think she is a great actress is general. I thought her Meg was a charisma vacuum, and it made me deeply uninterested in her subplot, to which the movie devotes far more time than the 1994 version.
I also think that having Florence play both young and adult Amy was a mistake. She is a very dynamic performer, but she does not look anything remotely like a 10-12 year old, nor does she sound like one. Her voice is absolutely lovely but quite deep/gravelly. When Amy throws a tantrum because she can’t go to the theatre with Jo and Meg, the scene played off to me; Amy looked just as old as her sisters, and the whole thing only made sense if you already knew that she was supposed to be much younger.
This brings me to my other major quibble with the movie: it relies entirely too much, in my opinion, on the audience’s presumed familiarity with the story. Rather than following a linear narrative, the movie is largely a bunch of flashback scenes. In the “present day”, Jo is already in New York, and Amy is in Europe with Aunt March. Jo eventually travels back to Concord because Beth is dying, all the while thinking about the past. To me, this approach of inter-cutting different timelines drained the story of its emotional impact to a large extent; I wasn’t watching “little” women grow up, I was watching an adult woman reminiscing about her childhood. There is emotional power in that kind of story, but that is not what Little Women is for me. Your mileage may vary, obviously. I still enjoyed the movie because I knew the backstory, and because the individual flashbacks were so wonderfully acted, but I can’t say that I loved it in the same way as the 1994 version.
Another director’s choice that I didn’t enjoy was the ending, and specifically 2 aspects. One, there is an added scene where Jo second-guesses her decision to turn down Laurie’s proposal long after it was made. I have no idea if this was in the book, but it wasn’t in the previous movie and I feel like it muddies the waters unnecessarily. I think this version did a better job than the 1994 one of showing that Jo only loved Laurie in a platonic manner and that she was better off either alone or with someone like Baer. This new scene undercuts all of that. I understand wanting to show that Jo is rethinking her whole I-will-never-marry stance, but to go down the path of Laurie-was-the-one-who-got-away? The idea of Jo pining after her sister’s husband is icky to me. No, thanks.
Secondly, I did not like the resolution of Jo’s story with Baer. The way it was presented was too ambiguous for my liking. Did she truly end up marrying Baer, or was it all just a fiction? I liked the scene where Baer shows up at Jo’s house and interacts/bonds with her family; I thought that was lovely, and it showed how well he would fit in with the March extended family. But then the umbrella scene immediately thereafter felt rushed and much like an afterthought – and too meta. We all know that Alcott paired those two characters mostly so that people would stop griping about Jo not being with Laurie, but the decision to basically insert that very fact into the movie felt off to me. Little Women is not about authorship to me, though it clearly is what interested Greta Gerwig. That’s fine. I wish we had gotten a more satisfying resolution to Jo’s love story, but I guess it’s a minor quibble. (And we do have the “happy ever after” montage at the end which would suggest that Prof. Baer did, in fact, stick around in some capacity.)
Overall, it was a very enjoyable movie filled with great performances, and my quibbles with it are solely of the “creative differences” variety – I admire how beautifully Gerwig shot the movie, but I don’t agree with all of her narrative/directorial choices.
If you have watched the new Little Women, I would love to hear your thoughts.
If interested in a follow-up, read Little Men!!
Also “Jo’s Boys, and How They Turned Out”.
I really loved this adaptation, which felt fresh and modern to me. LW was one of my favorite novels as a kid, and I loved learning more about Alcott in college: she was a fascinating person who wrote all sorts of the kinds of scandalous stories that Jo does, both before and after LW was published. She was also very happily unmarried. Gerwig did, in my opinion, a great job reinterpreting the book from the perspective of Alcott herself, who would have loved to leave Jo unmarried at the end. So the choices you critique really worked for me, especially in highlighting the ways in which women’s stories, both then and now, are often viewed as satisfying only on the condition that the woman is romantically partnered by the end. I loved the structural changes in the film, which upended the linear narrative progression of the original publication, which came in two volumes, Little Women and then Good Wives. And the ending was great—the stuff with Professor Bauer with meeting the family and the train station was such a abrupt genre switch into romantic comedy cliche that it felt jarring unless you read it as the ending of the novel that Jo writes under the behest of her publisher.
All in all, I thought it was a well-researched and fresh interpretation. I hope it gets more love at the Oscars than it did at the Golden Globes.
I think it’s a very valid approach/perspective on the source material and while it didn’t resonate as much for me, I get where Gerwig was likely coming from.