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.
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