written for the screen and directed by Greta Gerwig
This marks my first new post since I was locked out of my blog for nearly a month due to a password snafu, and boy it feels good to be back.
It's equally gratifying to review a movie that was thoroughly satisfying to watch, if flawed in a few ways.
Little Women, based on the beloved novel by Louisa May Alcott, is the story of the March sisters, Jo (Saoirse Ronan), Meg (Emma Watson), Beth (Eliza Scanlen) and Amy (Florence Pugh), who come of age in Concord, Massachusetts both during and in the aftermath of the American Civil War. They face the tribulations of poverty, the anxiety of having a father go off to war, of illness, and adolescence in general and all of the challenges that come along with it. They live with their mother (Laura Dern) whom they affectionately call "Marmee" and are neighbors with their miserly Aunt March (Meryl Streep) and the seemingly curmudgeonly widower Mr. Lawrence (Chris Cooper) whose grandson Theodore or Laurie (Timothee Chalemet) strikes up a friendship with the girls, and Jo in particular. As the years pass and innocence fades, Jo and her sisters find that life can be a lot more difficult than they imagined while growing up, and that more than anything else, they will need each other to get through the tough times ahead.
I consider myself fortunate that not only have I never read more than a severely abridged version of the original novel, but that I have also never seen a single of the many adaptations of this seminal work prior to this film. That way, I was able to appreciate the story as a fresh experience, albeit one fused with writer-director Greta Gerwig's modern sensibility. Most notable among the liberties Gerwig took with the source material was to tell the story out of sequence, having it start with an adult Jo working as a struggling writer in 1868 New York, and looking back on her years growing up. It's an interesting and mostly effective storytelling technique, and rather than have the present bookend the past as some writers would tend to do, Gerwig jumps back and forth between the two, often in very effective juxtaposition, especially in one crucial sequence that will no doubt be familiar to readers of the book. It's only the slightest bit jarring, but Gerwig pulls it off beautifully, and wraps things up quite nicely, even though late into the film the narrative wanders into "meta" territory and makes one wonder if the ending is "real" or as it is imagined in the novel that Jo writes and successfully publishes.
While this kind of movie isn't normally my cup of tea, I always appreciate good storytelling and compelling characters, and Gerwig delivers on both fronts, aided by a stellar cast highlighted by performances from Ronan, Pugh, Chalemet and the ever-reliable Meryl Streep, among others, and a consummately-talented crew including two-time Academy-Award-winning composer Alexandre Desplat, whose sweeping orchestral score was a significant departure from his quirkier work for Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel and his jazzy, contemparary score for otherwise forgettable The Secret Life of Pets.
I generally enjoyed the movie, which thanks to its performances and Gerwig's creative appraoch to storytelling never drags, but I have to say that there was one element of it all that took me right out of the story, and that was the fact that Pugh, apart from playing adult Amy, was also playing her at twelve or thirteen, which, in all honesty, felt a little silly considering that some of those scenes were vaguely reminiscent of a Saturday-Night-Live skit, especially one particular scene in which Pugh, quite clearly an adult with her deep, husky voice, acted opposite actual children. At least one prior adaptation of this novel addressed the age gap between child and adult Amy by having two separate actresses play her at these different stages and it's my humble opinion that this should have been the way to go here, or at least some kind of CGI trickery. It's a shame, though considering how well Pugh performs as the adult Amy, and I understand that Gerwig's narrative goal is to show the character's inner transformation from spoiled child to weary adult, but really, having a twenty-two year old play a twelve-year-old was always going to be a stretch.
I was happy to have a movie for my post-millennial girls to enjoy considering how many Marvel slugfests I've dragged them to over the years, and I hope Gerwig's success means we'll be getting more movies like this in the future.
8.5/10
