“LITTLE WOMEN”: Growing up

Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan, Eliza Scanlen

Published December 24, 2019 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene

My rating: B+ (Opens wide on Christmas Day)

134 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

Each generation, apparently, gets its own cinematic “Little Women.” Count Greta Gerwig’s new version among the best.

Beautifully acted, classily mounted and delivering its emotional detonations with almost clocklike precision, this adaptation manages to do justice to Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel while viewing the tale through a protofeminist lens.

Gerwig lets us know what she’s up to in the opening scene, where aspiring writer Jo March (Saoirse Ronan) meets with a New York publisher to discuss her latest story.

“If the main character is a girl,” the bewhiskered editor (Tracy Letts) advises, “make sure she’s married by the end…or dead.  Doesn’t matter which.”

This is only the first of several moments in which the film takes aim at male privilege and arrogance in 19th century America (and, by implication, in today’s world).  Not that the film ever mounts a soapbox or goes strident.  Gerwig’s screenplay effortlessly incorporates a modern sensibility into the classic tale; it feels as if she discovered these  millennial attitudes  in the original story and merely amplifies them.

This “Women” is novel as well for its narrative juggling.  The film opens several years after the Civil War…the March sisters from Concord, Mass., are now young adults.

We’ve already seen Jo pursuing a career in the Big Apple.  We find sister Meg (Emma Watson) back in Concord; she’s married, a mother and struggling with money issues.  Little sister Amy (Florence Pugh) is in France studying painting under the watchful eye of their wealthy Aunt March (Meryl Streep, doing her best Maggie Smith).

There’s a fourth sister, Beth (Eliza Scanlen), whom we meet in the flashbacks that make up the bulk of the film.  (One of the great pleasures in Gerwig’s narrative sleight-of-hand is that we’re able to compare the mature women we first meet with their much more innocent selves seven years earlier.)

Saoirse Ronan Timothee Chalamet

Those familiar with Alcott’s book will feel  quite at home.  The girls’ father is off fighting for the Union (he’s a chaplain, a fact that gets somehow lost here). Left in charge are mother Marmee (Laure Dern) and the family’s loyal housekeeper Hannah (Jayne Houdyshell), who despite their own financial straits insist that the girls engage in charitable activities around town.  The two grownups have their hands full riding herd on four rambunctious girls with very distinct personalities.

Ronan’s Jo dreams of becoming a writer and sets little store by the domestic and romantic aims of other women her age.  Her polar opposite is Pugh’s Amy, spoiled and self-centered and not above a dirty trick or two.

Between them are the domestic Beth and the music-loving (but, let’s face it, sickly) Beth, who finds a patron in the old wealthy fella Mr. Laurence (Chris Cooper) living down the lane.

And then there’s Laurence’s grandson Laurie, played by Timothee Chalamet as a  charming/irritating rich kid with a flair for indolence, dramatic gestures and  ne’er-do-well behavior.  He gravitates toward the brainy Jo (one of the film’s visual highlights has the two doing a  limb-twitching teenage spazz-out on the veranda while the grownups dance much more discreetly inside); trouble is, Jo isn’t interested in being possessed by any man, even an agreeable rich one.

Now seems an appropriate time to voice my admiration for Ronan, whose flyaway hair and ruddy tomboy complexion are absolutely enchanting.  This young actress could read the want ads aloud and I’d hang on every word.  Nearly as good is Pugh — she starred in the very different “Midsommar” earlier this  year — whose Amy matures agreeably from brat to fierce individualist (“I want to be great …or nothing”) and she gets the film’s most genteely incendiary monologue about a woman’s lack of rights.

The film’s incidents of daily life slowly build a palpable sense of family and  commitment to community; indeed, the movie’s subtext seems to be about the “right” way to live one’s life.

The result is a film overflowing with lump-in-the-throat moments. Very Christmas, indeed.

 | Robert W. Butler

Read the original review and more reviews at Butler’s Cinema Scene