Little Women Review (Film, 2019)

Greta Gerwig knows film. She has a profound understanding of the medium for someone so young. I see so much of the French New Wave in her work, especially in her screenwriting, and it just feels so honest.

Little Women is a novel that has been adapted countless times since its publication in 1868 across media. There are (at least) six prior film adaptations, and even more in television, theater, and opera. It’s a tale that has resonated for generations. The episodic novel spans years in the lives of the March sisters, detailing moments in time with recurring motifs on family, faith, sacrifice, betrayal, growing up, and love.

Louisa May Alcott clearly drew from her own life experience to write Little Women, which means many adaptations treat Jo, the writer not interested in marriage, as a self-insert character in the story. This is a blessing and a curse for adaptations, as choosing to adapt Little Women with additional events and quotations from Alcott’s life and other writing broadens the world and establishes a clearer timeline, but typically does so at the expense of the other three March sisters.

Greta Gerwig’s adaptation does pull quite a bit from Alcott’s life, especially in the scenes at The Weekly Volcano Press. Jo argues with the publisher about the merit of morality in writing, the need for tawdry action at the expense of character development, and the hardbound rule that any female protagonist must be dead or married by the end of a story. The contract negotiations are similarly tense, including real details on Alcott’s sale of Little Women that are not part of some grand meta-text in the novel itself.

What Gerwig refuses to do is sacrifice Meg, Beth, and Amy to tell the story of Jo. Jo is the central figure that connects all the plots together, though she is not shoehorned into every imaginable scene to make her the hero of everyone else’s story. Meg is allowed to be a complicated character who believes growing up to discover a different dream is an admirable thing. Amy is allowed to grow and mature into an adult, still headstrong but able to accept that the world does not revolve around her. And Beth, dear sweet Beth, is shown to accept not just her fate but her own worth, where she is allowed to pursue her own happiness and take up space in the world.

Gerwig’s method of treating the sisters as equal is a time-skipping adaptation of Little Women. Emotional beats in the story are placed next to each other to bring out the parallels in the sisters’ stories. This is most successful leading into the third act, where every iconic moment you can imagine about Beth, Amy, Jo, and Laurie all happen within minutes of each other; Meg is included here with the often forgotten plot of buying material for a new dress with the money set aside for her husband’s new overcoat. This might seem to pale in comparison to the more dynamic conflicts the other sisters face, but it adds such a beautiful sense of perspective to the story. Meg has struggles, too; they’re just different than her younger sisters’. Amy and Laurie are living it up in Europe, Jo and Beth are at the beach with Marmie, and Meg is down the street from Orchard House, taking on the responsibilities of marriage and a family of her own. Life goes on and surprises us along the way. Love, life, and status in the world is recontextualized before our eyes as Jo, Amy, Beth, and Meg swing back and forth through years of their shared lives all around the world.

The time-skipping happens right away, though the narrative technique is justified very early on in a beautiful spin on an iconic scene. That first Christmas, where Marmie has the family offer up their Christmas breakfast to the destitute Hummel family, is practically American history at this point. Gerwig allows the March children to actually be children, talking over each, fighting each other, and laughing the whole way through. The sequence has never felt more real and alive. The sisters act like sisters, but are given enough of their own moment to establish that each sister is her own person with her own dreams. More importantly, each sister’s dream is as important as the other’s, given equal screen time and weight no matter how a modern audience might perceive their importance.

That is the genius of Gerwig’s Little Women. She does not try to rewrite the events of the novel itself to be more palatable to a modern audience. She presents the novel for a modern audience by recontextualizing the narrative. The emotional arc of the film is familiar to character study: establish the character, throw in a conflict that changes the way they see the world (the “I want” moment), hit them with tragedy when everything seems to be moving in the right direction (the “all is lost” moment), and have them rediscover themselves (the “growth and discovery” moment). The arc is just shared among four equally important characters and told out of chronological order.

The ending is a different story, and this is where I imagine the film can be quite divisive; the opening scene establishes the publisher’s expectation about how female characters must be written. The ending sequence sees the Louisa May Alcott jump out of Jo March (far beyond any insinuations in the novel itself) with the film taking on a very different tone for one iconic scene. It’s absurd, it’s bitterly satirical, and, for me, it just works. There’s a maybe four-minute scene that feels like a very different version of Little Women that has to exist for the narrative conceit of this adaptation to feel honest. It’s a beautiful surprise that Gerwig presents as if it was always the intended reaction to that scene in the novel.

The parallel structure of the film is not limited to the stories of the sisters being grouped together by theme or storytelling beat. The film is visually a mirror image of itself. Every shot in the first half of the film—running, close-ups, letter writing, nights out about town, carriage rides, hugs, street scenes, etc.—is visually repeated in the second half of the film in the opposite order. The tonally different scene at the end mirrors a beautiful and expected shot of Jo celebrating her first sale to the Weekly Volcano Press at the start of the film. The iconic moments of Amy burning Jo’s story, Aunt March’s threatening meeting with Jo as she predicts what the future of the family will be, and even the Christmas breakfast with the Hummels are mirrored in reverse chronological order in the second half of the film. I highly doubt they time out perfectly (it’s not so precise that Jo runs at 4:55 and the tonally different scene happens at -4:55 from the end), but the effect is very clear in its intentions.

The four young women are living their own lives, though their lives are forever entwined by growing up as sisters. It’s a simple reading to see how Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy each take on different aspects of Marmie’s life; it’s, frankly, a narrative conceit of the novel. What’s unexpected is seeing the sisters grow up to be more similar than different. A moment of childhood stubbornness in Amy is mirrored in Beth demanding Jo write her more stories, Jo rejecting criticism of her work, and Meg lamenting why she can’t have nicer things. They all clearly learn from each other in this adaptation, whether they mean to or not. The mirror narrative and time-skipping allow each sister to shine as a unique character because no one’s story, not even Jo’s, could really exist without the other three. In upending the narrative structure of the novel, Greta Gerwig crafts one of the most original, faithful, and exciting Little Women adaptations yet.

Little Women is currently playing in theaters.