Paddling Their Own Canoes

Little Women (Greta Gerwig, 2019)

I have to give Gerwig credit. I would not necessarily have thought that another rendition of Louisa May Alcott's populist classic was worth bothering with as a creative endeavor. I came to the film with a great deal of skepticism. Why tackle a project like this, apart from the obvious industry cred that comes with mounting a period drama with a baked-in nostalgia factor? And while I am still not entirely convinced that, from a cultural standpoint, Little Women is The Film We Need Right Now, I also understand that that's a rather unfair criterion by which to evaluate any work of art. It's there, it's certainly not hurting anybody, and it's worth dealing with.

Gerwig took Little Women and made the most contemporary (not to say "postmodern," yeesh) version of the story that anyone really could. It's not just that she deliberately punches up the proto-feminist fillips that literature scholars have been seizing on for decades. She also makes explicit the historical and economic limitations of the book itself, depicting Jo March (Saoirse Ronan) as a talented, ambitious author struggling to get her art into the world despite the imposed strictures of the market, as embodied by her publisher Dashwood (Tracy Letts). Since Jo / Alcott has no choice but to marry off her protagonist, she does so in the most conspicuously cursory manner possible, to a man who is little more than a cipher (played by frequent cipher Louis Garrel).

The film also enriches various characters by bringing their subtext forward, brushing them against the grain. Beth (Eliza Scanlen), who Alcott wrote as almost too good for the material world, is shown as having desires and feeling a certain ambivalence about being overshadowed by her more gregarious older sisters. The fact that Mr. Lawrence (Chris Cooper) saw her as special, despite and perhaps because of her retiring nature, made her death register as a real rather than a theoretical tragedy. Likewise, Amy (Florence Pugh) has traditionally been rendered as selfish and lacking the soul of the other March sisters. But as crafted by Pugh and Gerwig, she is an altogether more compelling figure. Like Jo, she sees the limitations that dictate what a woman can and cannot do in the world she occupies. But she is not given to direct confrontation, and whether true or not, she perceives herself as lacking the unique spark that drives Jo's rebellion. So she capitulates, in what seems like a mercenary way. But she only wants to survive.

Much has been said about Timothée Chalamet's doltish, somewhat anachronistically petulant depiction of Laurie. I can't saw whether another actor might have delivered a more convincing portrayal, but I think that Chalamet's discordant behavior ultimately fit nicely with Gerwig's overall strategy. Men in this world are not just superfluous but somewhat alien. They are the mystery that women are forced to contend with -- like Freudianism in reverse. This is subtly compounded when the Marches' matriarchy, overseen by the generally unflappable Marmee (Laura Dern), is disrupted by Papa March, coming back from the war looking and acting a lot like... Saul Goodman? Just bizarre.

As for Gerwig's decision to play with the novel's chronology, it serves several positive purposes. Of course it reoriented us to a story most of us know well. And it allowed for tonal rhymes and emotional loops and dialectics. Seeing Jo enter Beth's room twice in succession, for example, or having us experience Jo's rejection of Laurie closer to his taking up with Amy, serve to complicate the slow, gradual rhythms of 18th century narrative, filtering them instead through the concrete potentials of cinema itself. Granted, it's all rather tame; this is not Alain Resnais' Little Women by any means, but like the focus on particular elements of character, Gerwig's film represents not just an adaptation but a critical reading of the text, which is about as much as we can reasonably ask for. If there are going to be big-budget dress-up films (and there always will be), they should all strive to be as intelligent and engaged as this.