![]() Where the movie chooses to avoid Alcott’s story in favor of an exploration of Jo’s writerly psyche, it can veer into confusion for those unfamiliar with the book. What is a memoir, after all, if not a fast track to self-knowledge-a roadmap of where one has been that is meant to illuminate where one ought to go next. As she conceives her novel, Jo, now eighteen, undergoes the same transition of Gerwig’s other subjects: recalling past desires and wishes, and reckoning with the disappointments and sacrifices that womanhood will entail. The film’s temporal soup is Gerwig’s fantasy of Jo’s writing process, which stands in for Alcott’s own. But she is now unfortunately beyond saving, able to live again only in Jo’s mind and on the page. It was an illness Beth managed to overcome in the short term, and the triumph offered more years of cautious happiness for Jo’s favorite sister. Beth’s death, unfolding in real time, is bracketed by recollections of her in the full blush of health, and by a flashback to her fever. Like Lady Bird, Little Women is a semi-autobiographical work-Alcott grew up in Concord with three sisters, and modeled Jo after herself-and we slowly discover that what we are watching is not Little Women, the final product, but something more like Little Women, the making of: Jo remembering the key moments of childhood that will, by the movie’s close, become the centerpiece of her first novel. But in the hands of a nimble writer, time can be a malleable, slippery thing. To prevent the inevitable, to stall time or turn backward, is famously difficult. When it turns, it goes slowly, but it can’t be stopped.” As she says of her fate in one of Alcott’s most poetic lines, delivered with solemn elegance by Scanlen, who makes the most of Beth’s limited part: “It’s like the tide. Only sweet, sickly Beth (Eliza Scanlen) remains at home, though she will soon depart on an adventure of a more permanent kind, as she learns to accept her slowly impending death, the consequence of childhood scarlet fever. Amy (Florence Pugh), the bratty baby, is in Europe to hone her painting skills and find a society husband. Tomboyish Jo-Ronan, offering a perfect compromise between Ryder’s timidity and Hepburn’s ham-is in New York avoiding an unwanted marriage proposal from her best friend, Laurie (Timothée Chalamet), and chasing after her dream of becoming a writer. ![]() Played by Emma Watson, she is the picture of grace if not always the voice, her Yankee accent at times on the brink. We find the eldest, Meg, searching for contentment in her new life as the wife of a poor tutor (James Norton). The women in question are no longer very little, and the Civil War that cast a shadow over their youth has ended. We open on the March sisters in their late teens and early twenties. Unlike Armstrong or Cukor, who stay true to Alcott’s timeline, Gerwig begins in the middle of the narrative, depicting the second half of the story while weaving in scenes drawn from the first. Jo March and Theodore ‘Laurie’ Laurence (Saoirse Ronan and Timothee Chalamet). Greta Gerwig, Little Women, 2019, color, sound, 135 minutes. Gerwig’s take stands out for its choppy, semi-inverted chronology, one decidedly more postmodern than nineteenth century in feel. Never before, however, has the story been told with such narrative elasticity. The novel has been adapted for the big screen many times, most recently by Gillian Armstrong, whose beloved 1994 version features Winona Ryder as Jo, the brassy protagonist, softened with healthy dollops of schmaltz, and, most notably, by George Cukor, in the 1933 classic starring Katharine Hepburn, Queen of Brass, all swagger, swoon, and snarl. ![]() Little Women, Gerwig’s newest film, sees the writer-director dive once more into the breach of late girlhood, this time by putting her spin on Louisa May Alcott’s classic bildungsroman recounting the lives of the March sisters in 1860s Concord, Massachusetts.
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