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.

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Can You Ever Forgive Me? is the sort of lambently cozy movie that can only be made about curmudgeons. It is set at the tail end of Old New York, back when rent was cheap and still nobody could afford it—they were too busy getting drunk, and dreamt of being recognized for the books they were too drunk to write. Ambitious loners, like the biographer-cum-scam artist Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy), committed themselves to life sentences in this bohemian Siberia. It’s poetic justice: to quote Fran Lebowitz, wit is cold.

The director, Marielle Heller, keeps the film soft and buffered by snow. It doesn’t need the edge of a Nan Goldin photograph; in fact, the gentleness of her approach (no doubt aided by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty, who adapted Israel’s memoir) helps to expose that Israel’s bitchiness is harmful mostly to herself. It also adds a fairy-tale flavor to the friendship between the butch Israel and her gay-vagabond pal Jack (Richard E. Grant). In a city that’s already an Island of Misfit Toys, this pair is adrift in the snowbanks; they persuasively merge The Shape of Water with Midnight Cowboy. I even sense the influence of Peter Pan, made delightfully deranged: Grant’s imp from Withnail and I has grown quite old but neglected to grow wise.

While it’s true that the movie goes a little Hollywood with its message of self-empowerment, it never overexerts itself in extracting sympathy for these characters, whose neuroses probably have to do with being queer in less forgiving times. It gives them a fair hearing, tacitly, by observational keenness: in its presentation of a maybe-date that Israel goes on with a woman who’s maybe-gay. Can You Ever Forgive Me? is also a love letter to an obscure kind of bookishness. Israel’s con was to write in the voices of figures from her biographies (Fanny Brice, Dorothy Parker, etc.), and sell their bogus “correspondence” to collectors. She goes from venerating these wits to being their secret peer. And McCarthy channels these antipathetic impulses—secrecy and pride—with prodigious ease. The energy she had in Spy and Bridesmaids hasn’t been lost in understatement. Quite the reverse: seeing her play off Grant underscores the film’s belief in hidden talents.