Film review

Greta Gerwig (2019)

The appearance of the BBFC caption – announcing a U certificate with a caveat of scenes of ‘very mild threat’ – got a laugh from the audience at Curzon Richmond.  As if this wasn’t enough assurance of easy viewing in store, Greta Gerwig’s film is prefaced by a quote from Louisa M Alcott:  ‘I had lots of troubles so I write jolly tales’.  In fact, plenty of what follows is far from jolly.  Some of the threats are hardly mild:  they include vengeance, loneliness and death, and they’re all realised.  Yet Little Women does raise the spirits.  You leave the cinema elated by what the heroine, Jo March, and the adapter-director have achieved.

The film begins and ends with interviews between Jo (Saoirse Ronan) and Mr Dashwood (Tracy Letts), a New York publisher.  Dashwood is a character in Alcott’s novel (publisher and editor of the ‘Weekly Volcano’) but a more significant one here.  At the start, when Jo offers him a short story, pretending it’s the work of a friend, Dashwood puts a blue pencil through half the manuscript before agreeing to buy what’s left of it (at a reduced price).  Jo asks if he’d be willing to look at further work from the author.  He says yes but advises, to her silent chagrin, that ‘If the main character is a girl, make sure she’s married by the end – or dead, either way’.  At the other end of the film, they discuss the autobiographical novel Jo has now written.  With barely concealed exasperation, she explains that and why her heroine doesn’t marry.  Dashwood insists that ‘The right ending is the one that sells’.  Jo finally concedes but, in doing so, strikes a harder financial bargain with Dashwood than she would otherwise have done.  ‘If I’m going to sell my heroine into marriage for money,’ she says, ‘I might as well get some of it’.

Gerwig cuts to and fro between these later sequences in the publisher’s office and the closing stages of Louisa M Alcott’s plot, which sees Jo marry Professor Bhaer (Louis Garrel).  Although Jo’s exchanges with Dashwood are largely the film’s invention, they’re true enough to Alcott’s own feelings about the book she was writing.  In her journal for 1868, following the appearance of the first of Little Women’s two volumes (the second would be published the following year[1]), she recorded that: ‘Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only aim and end of a woman’s life … I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone’.  Gerwig’s Dashwood dialogues foreground the enduring conflict between artistic and commercial imperatives, and the hardly less short-lived struggle of female creativity against patriarchal authority.  It’s also worth noting, in this meta-textual context, that Alcott herself never married.

This is the seventh cinema adaptation of her classic (including last year’s version of the story, set in the twenty-first century)[2].   English-language television adaptations include four by the BBC alone, the latest, which also aired on PBS, as recent as 2017.  Yet another Little Women must offer something new; I’m guessing Gerwig was impelled to rework the material through a combination of personal inclination and assumed audience expectations of something more conspicuously ‘relevant’ to present-day concerns.  In other words, she herself has had to negotiate a position between self-expression and satisfying popular demand.  This doesn’t place a serious strain on Gerwig’s film-making, though:  there’s a strong convergence between what the director wants to say and what the audience wants to see.  Gerwig collapses the linear structure of the novel on similar dual grounds.  On the one hand, she’s acknowledging how familiar Alcott’s narrative is and the risk of boring the viewer with a straightforward journey through it.  On the other hand, she wants to enrich the meaning and increase the impact of episodes in the book by closely juxtaposing them.  The most startling example of this is a pair of sequences centred on the sick bed of Beth (Eliza Scanlen), the third of the four March sisters.

When Beth is dangerously ill with scarlet fever, contracted through a visit to an impoverished family in the Marches’ neighbourhood (in Concord, Massachusetts), Jo keeps watch at her sister’s bedside.  She falls asleep on the job, wakes to find Beth’s bed empty and fears the worst.  She hurries downstairs to find a reviving Beth sitting at the parlour table with their mother Marmee (Laura Dern) and the family’s housekeeper Hannah (Jayne Houdyshell).   It feels like a miracle but it’s a short-lived one.  Beth’s health deteriorates.  Several years later, Jo returns from New York to find her sister dying, and reconciled to death.  There’s another vigil; Jo again wakes up and Beth isn’t in her bed.  Jo goes downstairs; this time, Marmee is alone and weeping at the parlour table.  The scarlatina crisis occurs well before the end of the first volume of Little Women; Beth dies around halfway through the second.  In Gerwig’s film, the two events are just about consecutive.  As a result, Beth’s survival of scarlet fever is quickly shadowed by the realisation that she doesn’t permanently recover and the fragility of her first victory over serious illness makes it more precious.  When Jo comes down from the bedroom the second time, we realise the memory of doing so the first time is vivid in her mind, as the earlier scene is in ours.

Gerwig’s strategy takes a while to pay dividends.  In the early stages, her movement between episodes occurring at an interval of around seven years, while it isn’t difficult to follow, gives the narrative an unsettled, anticipatory quality:  you wait for things to settle down, for the film to get properly underway.  It’s only when you realise this isn’t going to happen, and start seeing unexpected facets of the story you might not have seen in a linear telling of it, that you engage fully with this Little Women.  Gerwig’s treatment is coherent.  Yorick Le Saux’s lovely cinematography takes every opportunity to intensify images of the New England landscape, and of figures in that landscape – Jo and Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) skating on a frozen pond, for example – as if to idealise the past.  This quasi-nostalgising throws into sharper relief the director’s de nos jours perspective on her characters and their situation.  Alexandre Desplat’s pleasant, conventional score seems designed for a similar effect but works less well.  The music is so much in evidence – and so often tangential to what’s on screen — that it sometimes sounds less like a counterpoint to the film’s modernity than like an elderly relative talking to themselves.

Greta Gerwig is keen to give each character due attention.  That’s admirable but there was a point midway through Little Women when I’d started to worry her democratic approach was getting in the way of Jo’s centrality.  False alarm:  by the end of the film’s 135 minutes, Jo is confirmed as one of the most distinctive screen heroines of recent English-language cinema.  Two others in that category were the protagonists of John Crowley’s Brooklyn and Gerwig’s debut feature Lady Bird.  They also were played by Saoirse Ronan, whose portrait effortlessly blends Jo’s ornery, driven side with her leavening wit.  Ronan does some breathtaking things.  Jo and Laurie are outdoors when she rejects him and explains why.  She knows she was right to do this; she’s nonetheless dismayed that she’s done it.  After Laurie has walked off, Jo sits down on the ground, incredibly quickly.  Actors are often fond of sliding down the wall against which they’re standing and slumping to the floor, in order to signal great distress.  Much more often than not, the movement looks artificial.  Ronan’s unsupported, rapid drop rehabilitates what’s become a cliché.   She brings off a key feminist speech – ‘I’m so sick of people saying love is all a woman is fit for’ – naturally and thrillingly.  The tirade culminates, unexpectedly, in ‘but I’m so lonely!’  Saoirse Ronan’s delivery of this punchline, which she injects with a passion as strong as but quite different from what’s gone before, is inspired and moving.

On this occasion, she shares the screen and the acting honours with another outstanding young performer:  Florence Pugh is the youngest March sister, Amy.   With her lack of height and round, potentially childish face, Pugh can pass for much less than the twenty-three she really is – allowing her and Gerwig to exploit the age difference between the younger and older versions of her character to maximum effect.  When Amy, annoyed that she can’t accompany her sisters on a theatre outing, vows revenge for this and burns the manuscript of Jo’s novel, Pugh makes the outrageous act both petulant and very seriously meant.   Yet there’s an almost shocking continuity in Amy’s selfish determination at the start and end of her teenage years.  The difference is that, in her ‘older’ scenes, Pugh captures Amy’s increased awareness of her nature.  She also makes you believe in, and sympathise with, Amy’s real desire to be an artist and is frequently funny – when Amy’s at her most exuberant and in sotto voce asides.  Pugh is an extraordinarily strong screen presence – there are a few moments when Gerwig might have done well to get her to tone things down a bit.  But most of the time you just feel grateful for this effulgent talent.  Eliza Scanlen is actually the youngest of the foursome playing the sisters.  She can hardly compete with Ronan or Pugh and she doesn’t.  Her playing of Beth is understated and touching.

Jo writes, Amy paints, Beth plays the piano – a gift from the Marches’ rich, lonely neighbour, Mr Laurence (Chris Cooper), Laurie’s grandfather.  Meg, in Jo’s opinion, could be a great actress – something that Emma Watson, who plays Meg, is not.  She’s competent but, even allowing that Meg lacks the drive of Jo and Amy, bland and emotionally shallow.  The scene in which Meg, dressed in a borrowed pink ball dress, is accused by Laurie of social-climbing falsity doesn’t work.  This is meant to be uncharacteristic behaviour on Meg’s part but Emma Watson is more believable at this point than she ever is as the young woman who marries Laurie’s tutor John Brooke (James Norton), for love rather than money.  Emma Stone was due to play Meg but dropped out because of a scheduling conflict (with the press tour for The Favourite).  That turns out to have been a pity:  Stone’s substance would have created a more satisfying balance of emotive power across the March sisterhood.

The male roles are relatively subsidiary but interestingly cast and played.  John Brooke is a limited character but James Norton does creditably with him.  (It’s testament to his versatility that, the evening after Sally and I saw Little Women, we were watching Norton as Stephen Ward in the BBC’s The Trial of Christine Keeler.)  Timothée Chalamet is unexpectedly humorous, not least in Laurie’s moments of exaggerated movement and even clowning.  As she does with Florence Pugh, Gerwig exploits Chalamet’s physique very well.  His slenderness makes him a credible teenager; his boyishness means that Laurie still seems callow as an adult.  The sometimes unappealing whiff of vanity that Chalamet has about him works well here – helps convince you that, in spite of his charm, Jo’s apparent soulmate Laurie isn’t worthy of her.

Louis Garrel gave off more than a whiff of vanity in Redoubtable (2017).  True, he was playing Jean-Luc Godard but it’s still a surprise, in the early scenes between Jo and Bhaer in New York, that Garrel has such appealing modesty and warmth.  He’s deft throughout but also decidedly French, as well as better-looking than you expect Bhaer to be.  In the novel, this German scholar-poet is overweight, losing his hair and many years older than Jo:  Alcott, to compensate for having to tie Jo into marriage, pairs her off with a figure who subverts reader expectations of Mr Right.  Louis Garrel suggests a mild eccentricity of spirit but he’s facially eccentric only in comparison to a young man as pretty as Timothée Chalamet.  Gerwig is aware of this:  when Bhaer turns up at the Marches’ home, they remark, with almost amused surprise, on his handsomeness.

Chris Cooper has a better part here than in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and the reliable Bob Odenkirk makes good use of limited screen time as the March paterfamilias, absent on service as a Union Army chaplain for much of the film.  (The few sequences specifically referring to the Civil War are somewhat perfunctory – perhaps a reflection of Gerwig’s limited interest in this aspect of the novel, as much as of her narrative structure.)  Among the senior men, though, Tracy Letts is the standout. Compared with the others, Dashwood is an obviously satirical conception.  Letts plays him accordingly – and very entertainingly.  The same goes for Meryl Streep’s Aunt March, the girls’ formidably cantankerous (and wealthy) spinster great aunt.   Compared with Ronan and Pugh, both thoroughly inside their character, Streep is doing-a-character but to highly enjoyable effect.  Just how crowd-pleasing a turn this is was clear from how regularly Aunt March’s putdowns raised laughter in Curzon Richmond.  And Streep is splendid in the verbal sparring that matters most, an exchange with Saoirse Ronan in which we see that the elderly lady recognises in Jo a serious adversary.  (The older actress may see something of the same in the younger one.)  Thanks to this dialogue, it makes complete sense, in retrospect, that Aunt March leaves her mansion to Jo in her will.  (It becomes the site of the school Jo sets up with Bhaer.)

As Marmee, Laura Dern can’t use her smile to dissimulate quite as she does in Marriage Story.  There are times when this threatens to sentimentalise things but Dern always manages to suggest that more is going on in Marmee’s head than appears on her face.   Gerwig orchestrates the conversations of larger groups wonderfully – the four sisters, of course, and the larger family gathering on the occasion of Bhaer’s first visit to Concord.  These interactions are refreshingly natural without sacrificing a plausible period feel.  This is an exceptional cast, directed with remarkable confidence.  It’s beyond belief they haven’t even been nominated for the ensemble award (or for any individual acting prizes either) in this year’s Screen Actors Guild nominations – especially when the ensemble short list includes the cast of the ludicrous Jojo Rabbit.  SAG is evidently full of professional actors who can’t recognise acting quality in others.

Greta Gerwig achieves her aim of novelty (in the circumstances, that word has almost a double meaning) but she does so without deprecating her source material.  She’s made a costume drama that’s never stiff, either verbally or visually.  Gerwig exults in emphasising the youth of her principals – running, dancing, fighting – yet their liveliness doesn’t feel forced.  She’s also succeeded in making a film that’s politically right-on but never pompous.  The one relatively weak part of Lady Bird was the last ten minutes; Gerwig’s binary perspective prevents that being the case in Little Women too.  On its own, the Alcott novel’s finale, in this film’s rendering of it, would be an over-extended celebration.  It doesn’t come across that way because romantic fulfilment is upstaged by professional success.  The authentic happy ending here is the publication of Jo’s novel – in other words, the publication of Little Women.   This is made clear in two key closing images.  One is Saoirse Ronan’s expressive face, on which Jo’s feelings are clearly read.  The other is the volume itself – in Jo’s hands, then on sale.   The heroine whom Louisa M Alcott hated marrying off is no longer on the shelf.  But her novel is.

28 December 2019

[1] The second volume was first published in Britain with the title Good Wives (not Alcott’s), in spite of the fact that, for most of this book, Meg, the eldest of the March sisters, is the only married one.

[2] The Wikipedia article on Gerwig’s film claims it’s the eighth cinema version.  This contradicts the list of seven adaptations on the Wikipedia entry for the novel.