Little Women looks outrageously gorgeous. French cinematographer Yorick Le Saux, best known as lens-master to Olivier Assayas (Non-Fiction, Personal Shopper), seems to have soaked himself in beau monde pre-Impressionism and then shaken it, like a skilful dog, all over mid-19th-century America. During one eye-ravishing moment, I whispered to a neighbour: “Tissot!” He said: “Bless you.”
No, bless Monsieur Le Saux. And bless Greta Gerwig. Not satisfied with being a Boho Garbo, as actress, to film-maker Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha, Mistress America, both of which she also co-wrote), Gerwig now follows her Lady Bird with a second writing-and-directing feat. She did not, we know, do the heavy pen-lifting. That was novelist Louisa May Alcott, who cannot have imagined that her 1868 book would reach out so far in time and cultural geography that in 2019 an eighth film version would arrive, starring, as the four sisters tossed about by fashion and passion during and after the American civil war, one Irish (Saoirse Ronan), one Australian (Eliza Scanlen) and two English actresses (Florence Pugh, Emma Watson). How’s that for championing the novel’s international resonance?
They all speak perfect Yankee. It fact you can’t find anything not note-perfect in this movie, including the sets and costumes. Which led my “Bless you” neighbour to condemn it, when it ended, as TV costume drama.
No! Much better! The sly smuggling of feminist subtexts — already a small part of Alcott’s contraband design — gives the film a sardonic, vibrant modernism. Some of its mischief is even Jane Austen-worthy. It’s a small step from Pride and Prejudice’s “It is a truth universally acknowledged …” to Saoirse Ronan’s Jo saying “Don’t tell me marriage is not an economic proposition, because it is.”
Ronan does the tomboyish lead sister, an Alcott self-portrait, with grace and exuberance. There are real trills and thrills, and vivid human tremolandos, in her loving interplay with her siblings and mother (Laura Dern); as well as with handsome young Lawrence (Timothée Chalamet), the tutor who becomes a pass-the-parcel romantic possibility to two rival sisters. “Play him as an adorable puppy,” Gerwig must have said to Chalamet — and he does.
The film’s spontaneity of style is broken only by Meryl Streep’s Aunt March. Peddling affectations, fluting patrician epigrams, La Streep acts as if America needs a Maggie Smith and Meryl has decided it is she. But even this might be deliberate. Perhaps Gerwig decided a histrionic gearshift would point up a generational divide.
Nothing becomes the film more than its leaving of us. The last section relates Jo’s success with her own first, part-autobiographical novel, named, of course, Little Women. It’s a sequence of sharp, artful, haiku-like scenes, inscribing the travails of book-publishing in the middle of the 19th century: from the diffident author battling gender bigotry to the very whir and stamp and bustle of those long-ago presses.
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Greta Gerwig’s Little Women is vibrant, sardonic and outrageously gorgeous - Financial Times
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