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Little Women (2019)
I’ve finished my journey through Hollywood adaptations of Little Women with Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation, which I first saw in theaters when it came out, but rewatched with fresh eyes after spending the spring generally immersed in Little Women and related works.
Without ever feeling rushed, this adaptation includes an enormous amount of material from the original book. Gerwig hits almost every major scene (RIP Meg’s currant jelly that refuses to set), plus almost all of the most famous lines, in part by letting the sisters talk over each other in the way that people in movies - perhaps particularly in period pieces - are rarely allowed to do.
This swirling chatter gives the March family a wonderfully intimate feel. Even when the girls are cross with each other - and like the 1994 version, this adaptation gives the full weight to the scene where Amy burns Jo’s book for revenge - you can feel that they know each other very, very well.
But by telling the story out of chronological order, Gerwig ends up drawing out themes that are present but less emphasized in the book. In particular, this adaptation is unique in the amount of time that it devotes to the March sisters after they’ve grown up. Often the second half of the book feels like the unloved stepsister, crammed in at the end because the filmmaker can’t avoid it, but here I’m almost certain that it takes up the majority of the movie’s running time: we both start and end with the March sisters all grown up.
The movie is also very interested in Little Women as an ensemble piece. This is the only adaptation, I think, where Meg doesn’t more or less drop out of the story after her marriage: her quarrel with John over spending an extravagant sum on the silk for a dress are part of Gerwig’s consideration of the question of marriage as a business proposition for a woman, most fully developed in Amy’s chat with Laurie in the Parisian atelier. (The scene is in the book, but this particular dialogue is an addition.)
Most of all, however, this adaptation is interested in the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, and offers two full portraits and one poignant hint at an artist manque: near the beginning of the movie, a shot of Beth alone at the piano dissolves into a round of applause at the New York theater that Jo is attending. The sound of clapping starts before the image changes, suggesting that Beth is imagining the applause, which she never sought because of her shyness, and now can’t seek because she’s dying.
However, our main artists are Amy and Jo, who approach this somewhat gender-inappropriate calling in diametrically different ways. In all other ways, Amy presents herself as a very feminine young woman, while Jo approaches her artistic ambitions with the same bulldozer ferocity that she brings to everything else in her life. The movie begins with Jo shouting at Professor Bhaer after he clumsily criticizes her writing (it is clear that Bhaer has almost as little experience giving criticism as Jo does receiving it), and ends with her publishing her smash hit Little Women, and also maybe getting together with Professor Bhaer, but that’s ambiguous and really not the point.
I must admit that I saw this movie with two friends, both of whom were sure that Jo did end up with Professor Bhaer, and rather aghast when I suggested the whole kissing-in-the-rain sequence was a fantasy Jo made up to appease her publisher, who assured her that she couldn’t end her book with her self-insert heroine a spinster. So you certainly can read it either way… and it seems a shame not to have Jo end up with Professor Bhaer when Gerwig cast someone so young and hot…
(In an interview Gerwig noted that casting directors constantly cast smoking hot twenty-something women to play characters who really ought to be older, so why not do the same with Professor Bhaer? The logic is impeccable.)
But making the get-together ambiguous also leaves open the possibility that Jo is a lesbian, or asexual, or what have you. The movie doesn’t commit to any definite reading of Jo’s gender and sexuality, but it DOES commit to the idea that something is up with Jo’s gender and sexuality, and Jo is aware of this without quite understanding it.
This comes through especially clearly in the scene where Jo turns down Laurie’s proposal. She knows that she’s terribly fond of him, and she also knows that she just doesn’t love him the way she is supposed to love him in order to marry him, and it confuses and frustrates her because she just doesn’t know why she can’t. And yet she can’t.
Near the end of the movie, desperately lonely after Beth dies, Jo suggests that she might have changed her mind about accepting Laurie’s proposal - not because she loves him now, but because “I care more to be loved” than she did when he first proposed. This line comes directly from the book, but in the book it takes place in context of the letter announcing Laurie and Amy’s marriage: Jo is saying, essentially, “Phew, if Laurie had asked again I might have married him for all the wrong reasons, but now that he and Amy are married, I’m safe.”
In the 2019 version, as in the 1994 version, Laurie and Amy don’t tell the Marches they’re married till they're back in the States. Jo makes this comment in a discussion with her mother about her loneliness, and follows it up (as Jo does in the 1994 version) with a letter to Laurie, suggesting that she’s changed her mind.
In the 1994 version, this is a straightforward two-ships-passing-in-the-night tragedy: Laurie fell in love with Jo when she didn’t want him, and Jo fell in love with Laurie just as he was moving on. In the 2019 version, the tragedy is that Jo may be trying to commit herself to a life she doesn’t want, because she sees no other escape from her loneliness.
Without ever feeling rushed, this adaptation includes an enormous amount of material from the original book. Gerwig hits almost every major scene (RIP Meg’s currant jelly that refuses to set), plus almost all of the most famous lines, in part by letting the sisters talk over each other in the way that people in movies - perhaps particularly in period pieces - are rarely allowed to do.
This swirling chatter gives the March family a wonderfully intimate feel. Even when the girls are cross with each other - and like the 1994 version, this adaptation gives the full weight to the scene where Amy burns Jo’s book for revenge - you can feel that they know each other very, very well.
But by telling the story out of chronological order, Gerwig ends up drawing out themes that are present but less emphasized in the book. In particular, this adaptation is unique in the amount of time that it devotes to the March sisters after they’ve grown up. Often the second half of the book feels like the unloved stepsister, crammed in at the end because the filmmaker can’t avoid it, but here I’m almost certain that it takes up the majority of the movie’s running time: we both start and end with the March sisters all grown up.
The movie is also very interested in Little Women as an ensemble piece. This is the only adaptation, I think, where Meg doesn’t more or less drop out of the story after her marriage: her quarrel with John over spending an extravagant sum on the silk for a dress are part of Gerwig’s consideration of the question of marriage as a business proposition for a woman, most fully developed in Amy’s chat with Laurie in the Parisian atelier. (The scene is in the book, but this particular dialogue is an addition.)
Most of all, however, this adaptation is interested in the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, and offers two full portraits and one poignant hint at an artist manque: near the beginning of the movie, a shot of Beth alone at the piano dissolves into a round of applause at the New York theater that Jo is attending. The sound of clapping starts before the image changes, suggesting that Beth is imagining the applause, which she never sought because of her shyness, and now can’t seek because she’s dying.
However, our main artists are Amy and Jo, who approach this somewhat gender-inappropriate calling in diametrically different ways. In all other ways, Amy presents herself as a very feminine young woman, while Jo approaches her artistic ambitions with the same bulldozer ferocity that she brings to everything else in her life. The movie begins with Jo shouting at Professor Bhaer after he clumsily criticizes her writing (it is clear that Bhaer has almost as little experience giving criticism as Jo does receiving it), and ends with her publishing her smash hit Little Women, and also maybe getting together with Professor Bhaer, but that’s ambiguous and really not the point.
I must admit that I saw this movie with two friends, both of whom were sure that Jo did end up with Professor Bhaer, and rather aghast when I suggested the whole kissing-in-the-rain sequence was a fantasy Jo made up to appease her publisher, who assured her that she couldn’t end her book with her self-insert heroine a spinster. So you certainly can read it either way… and it seems a shame not to have Jo end up with Professor Bhaer when Gerwig cast someone so young and hot…
(In an interview Gerwig noted that casting directors constantly cast smoking hot twenty-something women to play characters who really ought to be older, so why not do the same with Professor Bhaer? The logic is impeccable.)
But making the get-together ambiguous also leaves open the possibility that Jo is a lesbian, or asexual, or what have you. The movie doesn’t commit to any definite reading of Jo’s gender and sexuality, but it DOES commit to the idea that something is up with Jo’s gender and sexuality, and Jo is aware of this without quite understanding it.
This comes through especially clearly in the scene where Jo turns down Laurie’s proposal. She knows that she’s terribly fond of him, and she also knows that she just doesn’t love him the way she is supposed to love him in order to marry him, and it confuses and frustrates her because she just doesn’t know why she can’t. And yet she can’t.
Near the end of the movie, desperately lonely after Beth dies, Jo suggests that she might have changed her mind about accepting Laurie’s proposal - not because she loves him now, but because “I care more to be loved” than she did when he first proposed. This line comes directly from the book, but in the book it takes place in context of the letter announcing Laurie and Amy’s marriage: Jo is saying, essentially, “Phew, if Laurie had asked again I might have married him for all the wrong reasons, but now that he and Amy are married, I’m safe.”
In the 2019 version, as in the 1994 version, Laurie and Amy don’t tell the Marches they’re married till they're back in the States. Jo makes this comment in a discussion with her mother about her loneliness, and follows it up (as Jo does in the 1994 version) with a letter to Laurie, suggesting that she’s changed her mind.
In the 1994 version, this is a straightforward two-ships-passing-in-the-night tragedy: Laurie fell in love with Jo when she didn’t want him, and Jo fell in love with Laurie just as he was moving on. In the 2019 version, the tragedy is that Jo may be trying to commit herself to a life she doesn’t want, because she sees no other escape from her loneliness.