Little Women

Little Women does not, for the most part, feel like a current film. Obviously, the Louisa May Alcott book, published 150 years ago, is a classic—and Greta Gerwig has adapted it in full period splendor. It stumbles early on, insecure about how to juggle the host of characters and hops in the timeline, which forces the wandering eye to scramble as it takes in all the Victorian fabrics and wallpapers. Gerwig’s recreation of a Bowery street scene is so thorough that one wishes Jo wasn’t in such a rush, even if slowing down would defy her constitution. But the movie increases in sureness as it goes along.

Though the book is autobiographical, and widely considered to be timeless, it is set in a unique moment of 19th-century American history, when most of the men were off fighting the Civil War, leaving the women to their own devices. And there is another level of specificity, too, that the movie elides: Alcott grew up in Concord, Mass., to parents who hobnobbed with the likes of Emerson and Thoreau. There was perhaps no other place in the country at that time that was as receptive to women with artistic ambitions.

The March sisters, archetypically, each have their own: Jo (Saoirse Ronan) wants to be a writer; Meg (Emma Watson) an actress; Amy (Florence Pugh) a painter; and Beth (Eliza Scanlen) a musician. Their mother (Laura Dern) has a bleeding heart, and donates Christmas breakfast to an impoverished family (the Marches are poor, too, but float on their social clout); and their aunt (Meryl Streep), a realist, milks money and clout for all it’s worth.

Some of the sequences are magical and seem almost artlessly constructed: a play in the attic; a tussle between sibling rivals; Chris Cooper, huddled on the staircase in coat and tail, listening to Beth play piano—and conjure his late daughter; mother-daughter pep talks conducted in complete openness and trust; a proposal on a hill that blushes in autumn; a fulgent Christmas Eve ball and waltz of nonconformist strangers; a rescue on ice; desserts on the table that make justice material: a charitable spirit’s moral reward.

Clever filmmakers posit that the past is unreconstructable, and render it either ridiculous or like the present day in costume. Some movies, like The Favourite, manage to do both. Gerwig wipes away knowingness like dirt on a cloth. And though it is, in general, easier to lean on old conventions than forge new ones, I think there is a specialized talent that’s required to make 21st-century viewers appreciate Victorian naturalism as the Victorians did, given that yesterday’s “realism” is often dismissed as today’s artifice. Roma and The Irishman retain the social novel’s scope; Little Women captures its feel. We understand these characters as they understand themselves.

It might sound like a backhanded compliment, but please don’t mistake it for an insult: Gerwig has a gift for sentimentality—just as Frank Capra did. What everyman populism was to viewers in his heyday, empowerment via group identity is to educated, woke audiences right now. In the two movies she has directed—Little Women and Lady Bird—love is a buffer. Misfortune might hurtle toward you, but the overall good intentions of your neighbors or the love of your family (or both) bounce it back. The ball never lands in the gutter—and it knocks down a few pins of worldly wisdom to boot.

I think Gerwig’s sympathy with Alcott must partly stem from the fact that neither of their characters harbor ulterior motives. These New Englanders speak their minds without reservation, and, just as the ornate elegance of their words might dress up the clarity of their meanings, the filmmaker’s self-reflexivity disguises the seductive but commonplace simplicity of her own message, which is even older than Alcott—follow your dreams.

The director’s dream seems to have been becoming a feminist artist, and, because her protagonists are female creative strivers, the films themselves are implicit prequels to her own success: a success that the female creative strivers in the audience are invited to latch onto. (Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, which looked at writerly hustling from the other end, did not rest on any future-is-female contact high.) Personally, I think Gerwig’s reimagined ending replaces the patriarchal problem from the novel with a new parochialism: that our lives are commodities that we deserve to profit from—that one’s lifestyle brand is the same as one’s art. Dubious as those notions are, however, Gerwig honors Alcott—who never married and used her profits from the novel to support her sisters who did—and defines a model for female genius: a Portrait of the Artist as a Working Mother.

Gerwig’s talent for working with actors should not pass unnoticed, and the cast she has assembled is marvelous. Pugh hints at a willed naivete; Streep seems to revel in being a dowager, an American Maggie Smith; Ronan has fire in her belly, and conveys self-righteousness with the uncompromising brio of Katharine Hepburn, who played Jo in 1933. As the rich boy next door, Timothée Chalamet has the delicacy of a porcelain doll and he functions in the plot as an idle romantic plaything. If Watson seems a little flat, Dern’s indefatigable Marmee is the movie’s soul—and Gerwig’s spirit animal. She feels righteous anger every day but is judicious in how she deploys it.