LIFE’S WORK
A NEW ADAPTATION OF LITTLE WOMEN ISN’T SO MUCH an event as a beloved ritual: Louisa May Alcott’s classic 1868 novel has been adapted many times since its publication—five for the American screen alone, and plenty more for theater, television, and radio, reacquainting each new generation with the winsome story of the four March sisters living in genteel poverty in 19th-century Massachusetts. Yet the latest cinematic incarnation, written and directed by Greta Gerwig, arrives like a thing entirely of its own, and of its own time. It’s an adaptation so rich, so attentive to its source, and yet so thrillingly personal, that the combination of maker and material feels like an alignment of stars. And an ascension of one, too—Little Women is only Gerwig’s second solo directorial effort, after 2017’s Lady Bird, and it propels her into a league of her own. Gerwig doesn’t quite reinvent the novel but rather discerns, with X-ray-like intuition, the kernel that has made Little Women so formative for generations of ambitious women: it’s the story of a woman who wants to write, and write she does. And Gerwig also understands that this woman isn’t just Jo March—the tempestuous tomboy-protagonist of the novel—but also its author, Louisa May Alcott.
Alcott’s Little Women was originally published in two parts. The first traces a year in the lives of the Marches—teenage sisters Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, and mother Marmee—as they try to get by while their father serves in the Civil War; in the second part, set three years later, the sisters navigate work and love and marriage, and contend with the declining health of Beth. Gerwig rearranges the novel, crosscutting between its two halves and reorganizing them around Jo’s writerly pursuits, finding natural points of narrative (and sometimes strikingly visual) connection. Instead of starting with the text’s first line—“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents!”—the film opens with Jo (Saoirse Ronan) standing in the doorway of a literary press, silhouetted against its light in a rare moment of stillness. Then she enters the office, submits one of her stories to the editor on behalf of a friend, and upon its grudging acceptance, gets paid.
Jo’s initial moment of hesitant ambition, and its turn to ecstatic pride when her story is accepted, ripple through Gerwig’s film—which becomes, through its braiding of timelines, a portrait of the ways in which the dreams of girls grate against the pressures faced by young women. Amy, the painter, must contend with the difficulty of sustaining herself in a profession whose terms are dictated by men; aspiring actress Meg with the allure (and expectation) of a family life; and Beth, the gifted pianist, with the cruel and crude vagaries of mortality. Jo’s passions undergo their own maturing and tempering, but her story culminates, crucially, not just in marriage or death—as Jo’s editor tells her all women’s tales must end—but also something else: a published work of her own.
One could draw a straight line from Gerwig’s dancer-heroine running (and skipping, and twirling) through the streets of New York to Bowie’s “Modern Love” in (2012), to Jo running euphorically through the same city, in another time, in the opening scenes of This latest film seamlessly continues the preoccupations of Gerwig’s previous work, which includes directing and co-writing and (2015): the terrible intimacies of sisters; the complexities of mothers and daughters; and the existential lives of women in states of , their realities hopelessly exceeded by their own desires. The protagonists are all caught up in an ineffable sense of want—to be someone else, to be somewhere else—that slowly, through and with the other women in their lives, sharpens into a bittersweet understanding of who they are and where they belong. is also the becoming of an era, a canon, and a kind of womanhood.
