Little Women review

Greta Gerwig has been on the promotional trail in the last few weeks talking about her second solo feature, an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s landmark 1868 novel Little Women. I would encourage listening to as many of her interviews as possible, the longer the better, as they provide the best insight as to how and why her sophomore effort is as magnificent as it is.

Interviews with filmmakers are often not as interesting or insightful as you want them to be, with many giving vague or over rehearsed answers to questions they’ve heard hundreds of times before; this is not the case with Gerwig. She has been passionate, generous and articulate in describing her relationship with the novel and the various choices she made in adapting it. She can provide in depth reasoning for every narrative and filmmaking decision, displaying an intelligence that makes her ascension as one of Hollywood’s top talents seem retroactively inevitable and totally deserved.

The film she has made reflects these qualities, as well as the many talents of an all-star cast that includes Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet, and Meryl Streep. Whew! It’s a cast that is constantly running around, tumbling into and over one another, all speaking concurrently; the sense of energy and warmth the film has is infectious.

The number of previous on-screen adaptations speak to the story’s obvious timelessness, but what’s new here is the modern urgency Gerwig finds by highlighting key sections in the lives of Jo March, her friends and family, and fitting them together into a narrative that uses juxtaposition and non-liner progression to make smartly contemporary points. Woman’s agency, their relationship to money, and class tensions are all just as relevant here as the tales of love, both familial and romantic, that have been fore fronted in previous versions. 

The through line of the film is Jo’s (Ronan) quest to become a published author living in New York, and her struggles with the practical difficulties of that, as well as trying to find her voice as a writer, are used by Gerwig to draw parallels between Alcott, her fictional heroine, and Gerwig herself, along with countless other little women over the last 150 years. There is a real sense of the impact of the novel, the way it has become a source of connection for so many generations of girls, young and old, including those onscreen.

This is a real masterpiece of a film, and what most excites me is that we are seeing in real time the development of Gerwig, Ronan and Chalamet into maybe the most exciting young team in American cinema. After Ladybird and Little women, the promise of what this group could produce in the coming decade makes me feel like Jo March watching her first book be printed into existence, a sense that the world of art could be about to make a great leap forward.