In what was an undeniably wonderful year for film—2019 featured Parasite, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Portrait of a Lady on Fire among many other highly-touted offerings—Greta Gerwig’s Little Women was a bit lost in the shuffle. It certainly did not go unnoticed: in addition to tremendous reviews, it received six nominations for Academy Awards, including Best Picture. But most conversations about the films of 2019 placed Little Women in a second tier below the genuine masterpieces. Such placement is an injustice to the brilliance of Gerwig’s film.
In a filmmaking milieu besotted with remaking former hits, extending long-living franchises ad infinitum, trusting exclusively in pre-existing IP and even staging basically identical films with a few minor changes (the most recent Star Wars trilogy), Little Women is a light in the darkness for cinephiles. For those of us who find the Marvel movies boring live-action video games and the continued efforts at expanding the Harry Potter films mindless CGI gobbledygook, Gerwig has shown that good cinema can emerge from a remake.
Little Women has been rendered into cinema several times, including as recently as 1994. But Gerwig’s version is new; it offers up something exciting, something that we have not seen before. She manipulates the timeline of the narrative, telling the familiar story in jumping, jagged snippets that bounce forward and backward chronologically, rather than in a straightforward past-to-future line. Her film is also, for lack of a clearer or bigger word, fun. Overall, the story of Little Women is neither happy nor sad, though as a proto-feminist fable set in the steam age, it probably leans more towards the tragic than the ecstatic. But under Gerwig’s direction, the film sparks with delight: characters giggle in the background of scenes, the score bounces, the Oscar-winning costumes are less stuffy than previous versions and the setting feels alive. Most especially, however, this version of Little Women is playful. Gerwig knows that the vast majority of viewers know the story of the March sisters already, so she fucks with us with time jumping, color palette shifting and, best of all, a Bergman-homage multi-character first-person address-to-camera metafictional ending that is a thrill even on the fourth viewing.
The ending completely transforms the film, the book and common interpretations of the book. Traditionally, Little Women is seen as a loosely fictionalized narrative accounting of the lives of the very real March sisters, who grew up with hippie-Transcendentalist parents in post(ish)-Civil War Massachusetts. That is not what Gerwig’s film asserts. The new ending, with Saoirse Ronan’s Jo March and Tracy Letts’ Mr. Dashwood (the book’s publisher) negotiating the ending of the novel that would become Little Women in direct-to-camera addresses renders the book into a subversive Trojan Horse wherein sneaky women pretend to play by the rules of society and capitalism in order to publish feminist literature that is also personally financially lucrative. Gerwig transforms Louisa May Alcott into a vast puppet master, who, rather than telling the biographies of her immediate family is instead fabricating the story herself, metafictionally marrying off her characters (who happen to also be real people) for literary and/or financial reasons. It is a diabolically clever overturning of the placid way a classical children’s book is usually discussed and Gerwig managed it easily enough, though with far too few accolades.
If this what Hollywood does with its “low-risk investments in existing IP”—what previous generations of Hollywood execs used to call “filmmaking”—then the future is perhaps not so bleak.
Photo courtesy of Wilson Webb/Sony Pictures
The post Criminally Underrated: Little Women appeared first on Spectrum Culture.