Greta Gerwig’s 2019 reimagining of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is a fragmented ode to the story that so many little women grew up on. It details the lives of the four March sisters: Meg (Emma Watson), Jo (Saoirse Ronan), Beth (Eliza Scanlen), and Amy (Florence Pugh) during and after the Civil War in Massachusetts. They live well but seem poor to their peers, especially their neighbor, Theodore Laurence or “Laurie” (Timothée Chalamet). Jo quickly becomes fast friends with Laurie, and he becomes entangled in the bold lives of the March sisters. In preparation for watching the movie, I read the book. I’m glad I did, because without prior knowledge of the book, I would have been confused, if not completely bewildered. Gerwig makes the bold move of starting the movie when all the sisters have already grown up, while the book moves chronologically from childhood on. She then switches back and forth between that time period and their childhood incessantly, distinguishing the two time periods with a blue-toned palette for the present and rich red and green hues for the past. This made the transitions between time periods easier to parse and emotionally moving at many parts, though not always seamless. Gerwig makes clever use of the transitions, especially in developing relationships between characters over time.
The clear stars of the movie are Jo March and her little sister, Amy. Pugh and Ronan are both so talented that they bring depth of character to snippets of plot that would’ve felt lacking otherwise. The tension between the two is developed in both time periods and is proven to be about so much more than Laurie, who both of them love in various ways. Laurie is an interesting figure, with a much smaller character than the women that surround him. Gerwig beautifully shows how he falls in love, not only with one of the sisters, but with all of them. Bereft of any family or femininity, he is locked away in his grand home with his stern grandfather and his tutor until he nearly starves for fun and affection, provided by each of the sisters in turn.
Gerwig dedicates less screen time to the other two sisters, Meg and Beth, so they have less opportunity to grab our attention. Their characters have always been more demure and less sparkling, so less emotional connection was made with each of them. But Gerwig sneaks in lines of dialogue that give you insight into their character. That’s a common occurrence: Little Women is full of painful, tender one-liners. For example, after Laurie rebukes her for dressing up at a party, Meg says: “Let me have my fun. I promise I’ll be desperately good for the rest of my life.”
While switching between time periods allowed Gerwig to make a lot of parallels clear and even heart-wrenching, it also served to fragment the story into pieces that you had to pick up off the ground. Luckily, I had my knowledge of the book to orient myself and make connections for why characters were doing one thing. But without the book, it felt as though plots simply happened because they did. The motivations for characters’ actions were dropped out. There was one scene where Amy was pressing down on her nose, but we’d never been informed that she disliked her nose because it wasn’t aquiline enough for polite society. Many of these small moments were sprinkled throughout the film. They were like little prizes for book-readers but anomalies for those who weren’t familiar with the story. This also carried over to larger plot points, like the relationship between Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel), a German professor, and Jo, as they were both tutoring children in New York. It was as though Gerwig loved Little Women enough to slavishly adapt some scenes to film, but not make a coherent movie out of it. That’s not to say it wasn’t successful. I was crying for at least an hour of the film straight, and I could feel my heart shatter into fragments. But I wonder if it could elicit the same kind of reaction from viewers who hadn’t read the book and gotten emotionally attached to the characters.
Sound is also crafted lovingly and used in every scene. Little Women is, to say it plainly, noisy. Even the score that Gerwig told Alexandre Desplat to create by mixing “David Bowie with Mozart” nearly crosses the decibel threshold of enjoyment. But that’s as it should be. The book was always boisterous, and that is translated to the screen as well, though nearly on the border of raucous. Sonically, it’s a feast, and every shouting overlay of the girls is there for a reason. In one time period, Jo tramps down the stairs with a loud “thump, thump, thump.” The next second, she runs down them again with hardly an echo—and it tells you all you need to know about the scene that comes next. The girls shout and squeal and scream—they take up so much space! It’s refreshing to see women speak most of the dialogue and be in most of the scenes. It’s their story, and no man in it can steal it from them.
Little Women is a story by women, about women whose souls aren’t little in any sense of the word. Little Women’s feminism isn’t new; it was there in 1868 when Alcott wrote it. The story has always been about balancing independence and wanting human connection. Jo wails to her mother in tears, “Women have minds, and they have souls as well as just hearts. I’m so sick of it—sick of it that they think love is all a woman is fit for . . . But I’m so—I’m so lonely.” Gerwig also manages to balance the ending on the perfect edge between truth and fiction. Alcott was forced to marry off all of her characters to sell Little Women, so Gerwig tries to be faithful to both the text and Alcott’s intentions. Using the lighting she’s set up throughout the whole film and deft interweaving of dialogue, she manages to have her cake and eat it too.
Little Women cannot stand alone, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth watching. It stands with Louisa May Alcott struggling against the world in the 1800s and it stands with every woman who ever found themselves in a story that made their lives, their everyday, domestic lives that have been erased by history worthy of a book—and now a film.