I’ve never read Little Women. Raised as a male, I was given a set of rigidly gendered directives: Never cry; keep a bullfrog under your coonskin cap at all times; if you must read, read something manly and improving, such as Ragged Dick or The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
Well, that was then. Having spent 681 minutes watching every Little Women movie I could get my hands on—681 minutes in the company of the March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, festooned with kittens, surfeited with punch and pickled limes, and pleading softly for relief—I’m reformed.
Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, the latest in a century of adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel about four sisters in Civil War-era Massachusetts, has already become a culture-war conversation piece. New York Times critic Janet Maslin tweeted that she’d “been told by 3 male friends who usually trust me that they either refuse to see [Little Women] or probably won’t have time.” The news that some men didn’t see their filmgoing choices as subject to the dictates of feminist allyship was upsetting to a certain section of Twitter, and it launched a long and tedious discussion in America’s culture pages about what sorts of stories men will consume and admire.
Yet men really should pay to see this film. Any source material, no matter how treacly it seems, can come throbbingly alive in the right hands. I had struggled through the 1933 (directed by George Cukor), 1994 (directed by Gillian Armstrong), and 2017 (BBC) versions of Little Women. Not even such sublime beauties as Katharine Hepburn, Winona Ryder, or Maya Hawke (a replica of her mother, Uma Thurman) could salve my boredom, though I did relish Claire Danes’s ugly-crying, deathbed turn as Beth. And even I was entranced by Gerwig’s film.
Gerwig’s Little Women succeeds not for the reasons offered by its feminist champions: by illuminating the ostensibly dull domestic concerns neglected by pop culture or by offering a model for future generations of independent girls. It triumphs for the old-fashioned reason that it’s a flawlessly written, acted, and shot film, a sensory feast so toothsome that you’d never share it with the poor Hummels down the lane.
The film’s challenge to March family newcomers is that it’s told out of sequence, with the action alternating between 1868 and 1861. It opens in ’68 with Jo (Saoirse Ronan), the headstrong protagonist of the novel, submitting herself and her manuscript to the scrutiny of a magazine editor, Mr. Dashwood (Tracy Letts, who plays Ronan’s father in Gerwig’s 2017 Lady Bird). Advancing past his paternalistic skepticism, she sells her first story, and we see her, in gender-fluid attire, racing against a black tide of behatted, mustachioed men through the streets of old New York City.
This film is about the writer’s life, down to details such as Jo’s ink-spotted hands and her anxiety while Mr. Dashwood judges her work. In one priceless scene, a German professor, Friedrich Bhaer, critiques Jo’s work with "who, me?" condescension: “I thought you wanted honesty. Has no one ever talked to you like this before?” (Louis Garrel as Bhaer looks more like a broke, dissipated young adjunct than like the respectable, aged academic of every other adaptation.) We see Jo shaking out a hand cramp while writing, Jo covering her floor with a grid of loose pages—these are superb illustrations of the dreaded Writing Process.
In Gerwig’s hands, domestic life in 1861 is anything but tedious. It is loud, frenetic, and kaleidoscopically colorful. In many scenes featuring all four sisters, lines are fired off one after another, giving the dialogue a hypnotic, antiphonic quality. There’s plenty of dancing, stamping, leaping about, hugging, air fencing, mock and real fighting; the full-tilt physicality of Jo and Laurie (Timothee Chalamet) projects youth and energy like nothing I’ve seen in years. The film is filled with patterned wallpaper, fantastic costumes, and elaborate arrangements of food or flowers. Florence Pugh, who plays Amy, is back in the psychedelically floral mise en scène of 2019’s horror movie Midsommar, minus the nightmares.
Gerwig’s versatile cast carries off both comedy and tragedy with subtlety and grace. Mr. Laurence (Chris Cooper) slumped on his staircase, squeezing his fist as he fights back tears at the memory of his dead daughter, is unforgettable, as is Jo's and Beth’s (Eliza Scanlen) seaside reckoning with mortality. Such moments of throat-clenching sadness are offset by, say, Laurie’s drunken outburst at a ball or his cluelessly insulting Meg (Emma Watson) for wearing a dress he dismisses as “fuss and feathers.” This adaptation features by far the funniest delivery of the famous line, “Your one beauty!,” as Jo takes off her bonnet to reveal that, having sold most of her hair, she now resembles Rosemary’s Baby-era Mia Farrow.
Gerwig resists feminist sermonizing beyond what’s there in her source material. Her audience is already aware that marriage is an economic proposition and that “women have minds and souls as well as just hearts.” Her Little Women is about girls, but not only girls. It’s about the evanescence and fragility of youth. It’s about ambitions and dreams in full, arrogant bloom (“The world will never forget Jo March!”) before some of them, at least, wither on the vine.
It’s a reminder that possibilities aren’t endless. It’s a reminder that one’s choices, including the choice to be stubborn or have a grandiose sense of self “too noble to curb, too lofty to bend," have consequences.
“Life is too short,” Jo says, “to be angry at one’s sisters.” But life isn’t short at all. Childhood is. If youth-obsessed Hollywood and the death-fearing public find Little Women hard to savor, don’t blame it on sexism. With its painfully grown-up knowledge of what aging means, it’s anything but a children’s movie.