Little Women (2019)

REVIEW BY: ROBERT CHANDLER

Greta Gerwig's LITTLE WOMEN is a triumph, please do seek it out if you haven’t seen it yet. 

In literary adaptations, Jo March is like Peter Parker or Dracula; you feel you don't need another interpretation, you already have plenty and are very fond of one from before, thank you very much, so why make another version? And then the film arrives and it lands perfectly and you find, after all, there is room in your heart and your life is changed.

I was very happy with Maya Hawke's recent Jo March in the Heidi Thomas/Vanessa Caswill 2017 television adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's book. It followed interpretations of the character down through the century by Winona Ryder, June Allyson and Katherine Hepburn.

But Saoirse Ronan in the Gerwig film is something else. Her Jo is alive on the screen, right there in front of you. She gets the determination and the vulnerability, the strength and the hidden neediness of the writer just... right.

However, a strong Jo is not enough. Little Women stands or falls on its portrayal of the ensemble, the dynamics between the four daughters and the wealthy boy, who lives opposite. If the family scenes or the scenes of friendship and relationship do not mesh, if the characters do not connect with each other, then the film does not work.

Happily, Emma Watson as Meg, Florence Pugh as Amy, Eliza Scanlen as Beth and Timothee Chalamet as Laurie are all superb and bring exactly what is needed. It works beautifully.

Gerwig takes an aesthetic gamble by jumping back and forth in the timeline so that it is the characters' emotions that drive the structure; with clues as to where we are in the narrative provided by the colour palette (honey warm for the family's past, colder blues for the family's present) and the length of Jo's hair.

Gerwig has always been one to watch. She rose through the mumblecore genre, co-writing and co-directing her films, before working on a string of movies with Noah Baumbach, (starting with my favourite of his, GREENBERG). Baumbach and Gerwig became a couple. They collaborated on several more movies together, then Gerwig wrote and directed LADY BIRD, which was Oscar nominated and shifted perception of her work in Hollywood.

LITTLE WOMEN has a couple of directorial inconsistencies that irk - a slo-mo run, a break the fourth-wall moment - that do not fit the whole of the film. Perhaps the recreation of the world is too picture perfect, too. In paying visual homage to the society artists of the nineteenth century, the poverty of the nearby Hummel family is given no real power, even though it will come to have a devastating effect on the March family.

But these quibbles do not dent the achievement. The film is suffused with warmth and tenderness, and is a testament to the enduring legacy of Louisa May Alcott, to Greta Gerwig's skill as a writer/director, to Saoirse Ronan's performance, and to the power of cinema to portray family life and the repercussions of love denied, lost, found and embraced.

LITTLE WOMEN of 2019 is devastatingly powerful.