Wife cried through a good forty five minutes of this movie. (Spoilers) I think that once we hit the dead sister plot she was cracked and then the competing sisters for the love of Teddy/Lorry was too much for her little heart to handle. I’m genuinely sympathetic to her plight, but I felt the tugs on my heartstrings a lot fainter than she. I’m predisposed to like this movie because Greta Gerwig and Pugh, so my opinion isn’t going to count for much on this one. Little Women is a self-aware Austen novel with a hint of racial justice and four young women trying their hardest to speak with one consistent American accent.
The most interesting thing about the movie is the Dunkirky way that it jumps back and forth between the present and “seven years earlier”. The before and after plots of the four characters (simplified by the offing of the one redhead in the family, so three girls and one Timothee) are arranged with staggered winter sequences, which means that we get a lot of gut-wrenching juxtaposed shots of domestic bliss up against the agony of loneliness in the next moment.
Probably the most effective instance is the way that the death of the youngest March sister pairs with her one-time recovery from scarlet fever, alongside the ripening (and souring?) of Amy’s relationship with Teddy and that relationship’s inevitable crawl towards Jo in her grief, writing a novel and struggling with her feelings for Teddy. The way that Jo is forced to put aside her feelings for Teddy in the same moment that she receives Amy upon the news of her sister’s death works well alongside her mother’s advice about managing her passion with the same grace and skill as her mother does her own. Jo’s self-sacrifice, even despite all of the insidious ways that Amy has received favoritism and avoided, as Jo puts it, the hard things, is more interesting.
Wife says that she wishes there had been more conditions on the marriage of Amy and Teddy, because for the most part, present Teddy seems pretty dreadful. He spends a lot of his time whoring and drinking and never really shows interest in doing actual work for his grandfather or anyone else. We’re to assume that his wedding to Amy will fix all of his tremendous failings, despite the fact that he’s made and apparently broken similar promises about his rakish behavior to Jo in the past. Wife adds that she would rather had Amy turn down Fred and not returned to Teddy at all. She also says that she likes the way that Jo meets up with the Prof in the end, since he’s the only person who’s willing to be honest with her about her work and its quality. Everyone else looks up to her as if she’s unassailably kind and smart, but they aren’t willing to give her the criticism she needs to grow. (I think I recorded that from Wife correctly.) Wife’s challenge, which I share, was that passage of time was difficult to see at times. It relied pretty heavily on hairstyle. Wife understands that they didn’t want to swap out actors, because there were interesting things they could do with subtlety of their performance and juxtaposition, but could have padded down for more girlish figure, could’ve done more with lighting or location or setting to better ground things. The result was that Wife thought flash back was going on longer than it was, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I wonder if it’s something that would improve upon second viewing.
Little Women has Gerwigian elements in its DNA: the staginess of the March sisters’ drama club meetings, Amy’s unforgivable revenge for Jo’s theater snub (Amy is constantly being snubbed: at parties in France, as rebounds for her sister’s ex), the way that Jo and her publisher editorialize the schmaltzy ending to the movie, casting romantic endings as “mercenary”. As a sophomore entry, Little Women shows off Gerwig’s talents in a lot of ways: how she earns dividends working with old, reliable actors; how she cultivates new and emerging talent; her ability to find her way around historical material; her infatuation with the domestic; her fearless weaving of four complex, contradictory stories. I wonder if there’s a little part of you that wonders if you could outdo yourself by telling a different spin on Lady Bird, another foul-mouthed, seventeen year old’s struggle with personhood and mediocrity and finding your place in the world, and if so, Gerwig does a good job of standing out of her own way to explore new and different pastures.
(Update: Jan 23, I can’t get this article on Slate out of my head.)
