Little Women
From beginning to end, I have tears in my eyes, if not coursing down my face, while I watch this movie. At so many odd moments I find myself trying to choke back sudden sobs without knowing why a particular line has made me want to cry when it should have made me laugh. But that’s part of what this film is. While there are sad moments and powerful moments and disappointing moments and charged moments and angry moments, so much more than anything else there are happy moments.
This starts with Louisa May Alcott, but it certainly doesn’t end with her. Her legacy lives on through Greta Gerwig and Saoirse Ronan in this film, and they have not had easy shoes to fill either. But one of the things that is so powerfully felt through this movie is that it is made by women, about women, for women. Which is not to say that everyone else can’t enjoy too, my dad loved it. But it’s not for anyone else, it’s for women. Just like the scene towards the end of the film when the publisher’s three daughters come running in waving the manuscript around, it doesn’t matter so much what others, particularly men, think about this story. They can think it’s boring if they like, but I think there are too many books about war and that almost every single one of those is boring, so everyone else can get f*cked as far as I’m concerned.
If you know Little Women, you know it’s a story that focuses on the lives of four sisters and their mother living in Concord, MA during and after the American Civil War. As described by Jo in the movie, it’s a tale of ‘domestic struggles and joys’ and chronicles the everyday life of Alcott’s irl family (with liberties taken, naturally). One of the great services this film does for the book is painting the meta textual narrative as a strong focus point for the story. Jo is writing a story about her life with her sisters, but then Jo becomes Alcott who becomes Jo again or maybe is still Alcott and how are we to know? Both Jo and Alcott succeeded in getting their novels published, one inside the book, and one being the book itself. If you’re confused, that’s okay, it’s kind of confusing.
While this story could be about romance or drama or scandal, instead it is the simple story of a young girl who wanted to make something of herself through her writing and finally found a way to do it. As a writer myself, I find Jo incredibly relatable, not only as a general fictional character, but in this movie particularly. I shall confess, I have never read the entirety of Little Women, but it is not my fault. I received a very fancy version of it as a gift and didn’t realise it was only half the novel and have never gotten around to reading the second half. All this to say I do not know how well the film adheres to the original text. Regardless, I find myself in awe of both Jo and Amy at points in this film for how they champion the causes of women and openly lay out the struggles and hardships most women had to face at this time in history.
Never has one scene in a movie resonated so much with me as the attic scene with Jo and Marmie in this film.
“You know, I just, I just feel, I just feel like… women, they… they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. And I’m so sick of people saying that, that love is just all a woman is fit for, I’m so sick of it. But I’m, I’m so lonely.” – Jo March
She goes on a rant to name all of the good and wonderful qualities possessed by so many women, and she cannot bring herself to terms with the idea of a woman being confined to domestic duties, to the idea of being a housewife, to love and only to be loved. But the world she knew, that she felt was the ground beneath her feet, it has crumbled away from her bit by tiny bit until she has hardly a thing left, and she needs more ground to stand on. She is lonely because she is alone. And that is a sentiment I can relate to on such a personal level.
Beyond that, we are allowed a glimpse at Florence Pugh’s perfect rebuke of Laurie, time and time again, and her speech on the economics of marriage is such an eye opening scene I felt I had learned a great deal at the end of it. Laurie is cowed, as he should be, and I felt the sting of privileged existence for not having to think about these things, and I knew that look on his face was probably reflected on mine. (While I squealed ‘yaaasss queeeen slayy’ in the background, obviously.)
This movie is full of so many delights and joys, even the portrayal of Meg and her enjoyment of frivolous things like pretty dresses and fancy high heels that twist her ankle, how she loves to dance and laugh and to have fun. And when she gets married, we get to hear her deliver one of the best lines of the whole goddamn movie: “Just because my dreams are different than yours, doesn’t mean they’re unimportant.” Should have been a slap in the face to Jo if she’d been listening (which she was not). Because there is nothing wrong with wanting to be a housewife, to fall in love and get married and have children and prioritise family over all else. It is simply not what Jo wants, and should not be the only acceptable path for a woman to take.
I think one of the reasons this movie rings so emotionally authentic to me is because it is a story about sisters and their relationship with each other. I grew up watching the 1994 adaptation of Little Women with my sisters and mother, and it has been a family favourite of ours for a long time. It is also a beautiful version of the lives of these young women, showing the differences of their society and how they change as they grow. But there is something about Gerwig’s adaptation that rings even truer to the reality of what it’s like growing up in a big, chaotic family. I have five siblings and home was never a quiet place, neither was it ordered. So the scenes in this film where the sisters talk over each other or exclaim and scream and jump around, and bombard their mother or father or others with hugs and welcomes, the rushing around to find items of clothing, the chaos of trying to do your sister’s hair when all of a sudden she declares you’ve ‘ruined’ her. It’s so authentic and real, and this is not the only project of Gerwig’s that feels this way, but because of the centre of the story, it is one that I can relate to most completely. When Laurie brings Meg and Jo home from the ball where Meg has twisted her ankle, he stands in the door absolutely overwhelmed by the chaos going on in front of him, and it is such a wonderfully real scene. And weirdly enough, that made me cry too. Honestly, it’s scenes like this that make me think I want to be a writer like Greta Gerwig when I grow up (let’s all pretend I’m not nearly 29).
Returning back to the meta textual aspects of this film, specifically just to confuse you more (jk), the discussion at the end of the film between Alcott, being played by Ronan, and her publisher is absolutely fantastic. He insists Jo in the book has to get married to someone, that that’s the sort of ending people want to read about, a happy ending with a nice romance. Her response is simply to point out that Jo has been declaring the entire novel that she does not want to get married and she has stayed consistent to that wish. Consistency, the publisher says, is not what matters.
See, we could easily take this as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that the original book seemed to shoehorn in the romance between Jo and Professor Behr (I wouldn’t know, as I have not technically read that part of the book), as if consistency doesn’t matter. We could see it as a poor reflection of an assertion often made about women: ‘women don’t really mean what they say’. But Gerwig’s interpretation brings a new option to the table, and whether it’s real or not, it’s definitely the option I’d prefer to take. Perhaps Alcott was forced into making this hasty decision for the end of the novel. Perhaps she did not feel discontent with her life as a ‘spinster’ and had to write herself a love interest. Maybe, just as she had declared throughout the entire book through the avatar of Jo, she did not want to get married and she did not need to get married.
So maybe part of the reason I like this option so much is because I have been the constant and repeated receiver of denials of my own decisions about the future. People tell me I will change my mind when I get older or I just don’t understand what I want yet. But the reality is that I have always felt the way I feel now, and after 29 years, I think it’s safe to say I will probably always feel this way going forward. So yeah, it’s a silly comment to cover up a little hole in the plot or perhaps just a hole in the feminism of the novel, but it can also mean so much more than that. And to me, that is the message of this entire film. Everything can mean so much more than what it looks like on the surface.
Bless Greta Gerwig. Please watch this film, I do not have enough good things to say about it.
Little Women is available to stream in Australia on Amazon Prime, Now TV in the UK, and Starz and DirecTV in the US. It is available to rent and buy everywhere on YouTube, Google Play, Amazon Prime and Apple TV.
