Little Women (2019) Review

Writer/director Greta Gerwig’s second film behind the lens is an utter delight. A formal joy, with a terrific cast in tune with the vision of a profoundly perceptive filmmaker.

Based on the Louisa May Alcott novel of the same name, Little Women charts the lives of the March sisters - Jo (Saoirse Ronan), Amy (Florence Pugh), Meg (Emma Watson), and Beth (Eliza Scanlen). The March girls are guided by their Marmee (Laura Dern) through the hardships and poverty on the homefront of the American Civil War, as well as the demands of the society that remains.

Gerwig’s direction has an intuitive, reflexive brilliance that just absolutely toys with you. Gerwig and editor Nick Houy weave the threads of different stories happening over various periods to a convergence point. Audiences accept that the momentum towards climactic moments has a fixed tempo. The closer we are, the more frequent and consistent the beat. I was utterly taken with Gerwig’s choice time and again to set the rhythm and then subvert your internal rhythm. Some sequences in time demanded more time. In some instances, it was invisible in others; you could feel her understanding that something about that scene unfolding needed to unfold according to its own cadence.

Gerwig crafts performances where characters entangle. Each of the sisters conveys so much about their station or their aspiration/adherence to ‘expectation’ in their interaction. When the girls are young, it’s uplifting to feel the urgency they have to intimately embrace their mother, to the crowd over one another to hear her read their father’s war dispatches. As they grow older, they grow as individuals and they become defined by the space they make for themselves.

This flawless cast includes Tracey Letts, who pops up for a collective (probably) three minutes and knocks it out of the park. Every movie needs more Tracey Letts. However, it’s Chris Cooper’s performance that honestly snuck up on me. In a production where tenderness overwhelms discontent and longing. In one of the more moving scenes in Little Women, Gerwig composes a shot with Beth (Scanlen) playing the piano. The camera’s gentle pan out of the drawing-room with the piano reveals the steps descending from the second level of the house. Cooper is drawn to the notes on the piano. Arriving at a perch out of the side on a landing, he sits down to listen. Emotions and sense memories hit him like an unexpected shore dump of a wave. Cooper’s unguarded and raw performance brings an immediate lump to your throat. Gerwig knows how familiar we are with Cooper’s ability to bring unease, so casting against that is welcome and genuinely unexpected.

Emma Watson’s Meg March is a more controlled performance with Gerwig’s guidance - wrestling with self and selfless feelings about the life she has versus the life that she expected. Timothée Chalamet’s finds a way to gussy up a kind of Judd Nelson swagger and charming shitbag disobedience in Civil War duds for Laurie. While it’s most certainly an ensemble film, in many ways, it’s a tale of two powerhouse sisters steering their family’s destiny.

Saoirse Ronan’s Jo March is by a leap her most complete performance. Gerwig creates a platform for her charm, infectious sense of fun and determination to entangle with Jo. Wouldn’t this collaboration make for a lovely and unexpected sequel to Scorsese and De Niro? The force of nature that is Florence Pugh as Amy has the most to do in Little Women blooming and bending to be all the things that the most influential people in her life say she should be and reaching for the things that she truly wants. Her vindictive adolescent is as loveable as her world-weary object of affection.

There’s a scene early in the film where Jo (Ronan) and Laurie’s (Chalamet) first meeting at a party, blossoms. Shielded from expectations and away from the prying eyes of what should be right and proper, they dance, and we watch them. They begin dancing along a balcony that surrounds the party, warming up and overcoming their inhibitions shaking, kicking, free-styling - it’s a riot. Little Women is a triumph. Gerwig is a talent.

★★★★/★★★★

[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AST2-4db4ic&w=854&h=480]