Review: LITTLE WOMEN

Jo, Meg, Amy, Beth are ready to take on the world with their talents and ambition and they would were it not for the fact that they are poor (if genteel) and live during the American Civil War: prospect grim but for astute marriages, a point made the centre of Jo's meeting with a publisher. This film is about girls making choices, squandering them, being robbed of them by life or having them made on their behalf. For them the world is corsetted, crinolined and parloured where a girl's talents might grant them points on a marriage resume but, as with all their politics, tastes, joys and anger, are to be kept in place as "parts" rather than pursued as careers. As the 19th century source novel by the highly motivated and political Louisa May Alcott observes this as an expectation it also allows voice to the ambition. After Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig could not have made a choice more apt for her next feature.

The novel is a classic of American literature and beloved enough to have generated film adaptations from the silent era to now. Most of these concentrate on the girls' pursuit of marriage and the closer we come to this one, more of the undercurrents emerge. Gerwig's approach is to push the latter to the foreground, keep the marital stakes important but leave the weight of them to the other attempts for further discovery. This allows her to enhance the episodic nature of the source by managing the timeline according theme or character rather than a linear reading more appropriate for literature than cinema. At first this can be puzzling but only lightly so and as soon as you get the hang of it you relax into it and enjoy the episodes. The sense of an overall arc builds and the shifting of the time zones is deft rather than just stylistic.

Casting is key, as always. Saoirse Ronan as Jo shines, bringing fire and intellect (and frequent visits from Dublin in her accent: but with an actor this fine I just don't care). Meryl Streep clearly relishes the role of the grand dame Aunt March, adding sharp character to her patrician haughtiness. Emma Watson (whose accent also falters intermittently) brings a subdued suffering to her role and a sense that her character's strength lies in maintenance of the fragility of the humbleness she grows into. Laura Dern as the girls' mother, is the grown up version of that, endlessly supportive but feels every blow in private. It is Florence Pugh as Amy who I wanted to see more of, though. Amy's story struck me as a tougher battle, accepting her limitations as an aspirant artist, living as second best to Jo but biting on the bitterness to claim herself. It might be the performance that suffers her character's fate in the long run but for me it was the one I constantly waited for when it wasn't on screen. After the similarly thankless turn in Midsommar this year this just shows her growing fast as an artist. With all that Timothee Chalamet might well be trampled into obscurity but the easy aristocratic charm that hides his own frustrations at the world's constraints.

Gerwig is careful to balance the look and feel of the setting without giving in to the period drama wash which is why her parlour scenes always have a touch of claustrophobia to them. The shot of debutantes climbing the stairs with their hooped skirts creating a kind of traffic jam is funny, beautiful and mindful of the culture that demands it. The relief of the outdoors is palpable and a scene on a cold beach with Jo comforting the ailing Beth with the sand lifting in the wind in silvery wisps could have come from a Tarkovsky movie. This is a bitchy thing to say but in two features Gerwig has completely outclassed the entire output of her life and oft times creative partner Noah Baumbach. If he had done this it would have been hipsters in crinolines. Gerwig just makes it work.