Greta Gerwig’s Little Women came out on Christmas day and found itself instantly beloved by audiences and critics. The film tells a character-driven, complicated, and beautiful story about sisterhood, womanhood, and the role of art in our lives.
Little Women, for those who missed the classic book by Louisa May Alcott, focuses on the four March sisters: Meg (Emma Watson), Jo (Saoirse Ronan), Amy (Florence Pugh), and Beth (Eliza Scanlen), as well as their neighbor Theodore “Laurie” Laurence (Timothee Chalamet) and mother Marmee (Laura Dern). The film moves back and forth between the Marches’ childhoods and young adulthoods, focusing on their coming of age, domestic struggles, and finding their way in the world against the backdrop of a Civil War-era Concord, Massachusetts.
Gerwig’s vision of Little Women is a masterwork: a culmination of her considerable skill with navigating complicated emotional tones and executing a specific vision. Childhood scenes in Little Women are shot in a golden, summery, nostalgic glow--even at Christmastime--while the Marches’ adulthoods feature a bluer palate. The film perfectly captures the chaotic and nuanced relationships between siblings, and Gerwig deftly balances a multitude of perspectives in each scene, expertly representing every character’s viewpoint, which leads to a depth that other screen adaptations of the story have lacked.
This depth comes through most notably in Amy’s character--more often than not brushed aside as or relegated to an “annoying younger sibling” by other adaptations (such as Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 adaptation, starring Winona Ryder). But through a combination of Gerwig’s writing and directing and Pugh’s outstanding performance, Amy becomes one of the most riveting characters in the movie: a young woman with a deep internal life, who feels pressured to live up to older sisters she’s always seen as better than her while also shouldering the responsibility of supporting her family financially, despite her younger age.
As the title might imply, Little Women is a film with a lot to say about womanhood and the way women navigate the world. Each March forges a different path from her sisters--but each path remains markedly influenced by the characters’ gender.
“Just because your dreams are different from mine,” Meg tells Jo on the day of her wedding, after Jo tries to convince her to run away and become an actress rather than settle down, “doesn’t mean they’re unimportant.”
Meg chooses to follow a more traditional path through life: she spends her teenage years attending parties and meeting men, then marries Laurie’s handsome, young tutor and has a couple kids. Jo, meanwhile, chafes under the constraints of expectation. She moves to New York City to strike out on her own and become a writer, hoping to “make [her] own way in this world,” as she tells her Aunt March (Meryl Streep). She expresses relatively little interest in men and insists she’ll never marry. Amy, meanwhile, accompanies her Aunt March to Paris to continue her education in painting and French, but also to find and marry a wealthy man. In an impassioned monologue to Laurie after he questions whether she’s interested in marrying her beau Fred Vaughan for the right reasons, she details her feelings on marriage and her life’s path:
“As a woman, there is no way for me to make my own money. Not enough to earn a living or support my family, and if I had my own money, which I don’t, that money would belong to my husband the moment we got married. And if we had children, they would be his, not mine...So don’t sit there and tell me marriage isn’t an economic proposition, because it is. It may not be for you, but it most certainly is for me.”
As much as Little Women is a story about navigating womanhood in this world and about the process of growing up as a girl, it is also a story about the role and pursuit of art. Each sister has her own artistic pursuit: Meg wants to be an actress as a teenager, Jo’s passion and ambition in life is her writing, Amy pursues painting, and Beth is a talented pianist. Each sister’s artistry plays a key role in the development of her personality, character, and life path: Meg breaks Jo’s heart when she gives up acting to marry, Jo’s life purpose revolves around her writing, Amy’s painting is what leads her into her Aunt March’s favoritism and then onto Paris, and Beth’s music is what ultimately pulls the March and Laurence families together. Though Beth is typically the “quiet” sister, her music gives her a voice and a method of expression. The film’s focus on artistry actively invites metatextual discussions--the film itself being, of course, a work of art borne out of multiple women’s minds (Gerwig’s, and Louisa May Alcott’s).
“Who will be interested in a story of domestic struggles and joys?” Jo asks her sisters at the end of the movie. “It doesn’t have any real importance.”
“Maybe we don’t see those things as important because people don’t write about them,” Amy says.
“No, writing doesn’t confer importance, it reflects it,” Jo argues.
“I’m not sure,” Amy replies. “Perhaps writing will make them more important.”
And though Little Women has been critically lauded, it would be remiss not to discuss its awards season reception--where the metatextual conversation becomes louder. Despite being a critical darling and an audience favorite, Little Women and its writer-director failed to procure several anticipated and deserved nominations at the Golden Globes as well as the Oscars (Gerwig was shut out of the Best Director category of the Oscars and the Globes, which both featured all-male rosters instead; the Globes also snubbed her for Best Screenplay and the film for Best Drama). A number of other women-directed critical and audience favorites found themselves ignored in major categories, too: Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, Lorene Scarafia’s Hustlers, Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart, Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, and Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, to name just a few. This has led, of course, to much online discussion about the role of women’s stories and the way our culture and society treat women storytellers.
Pugh minced no words on the matter: “It’s just highlighting the point. It’s just completely underlining how important this film is, and how the themes are still apparent now. If we think about it like that, it’s a weird blessing in disguise...It’s only highlighting the importance of this story.”
Despite its lack of recognition by the Academy or the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Little Women’s critical reception and widespread success seals Gerwig’s reputation as the thoughtful and precise auteur she is. And the outcry surrounding award shows’ inability to reward such hard work and talent means that, hopefully, future awards might recognize and reflect what public and critics alike already seem to know: that women’s stories are powerful and valuable, and that they must be told.
Little Women remains in theaters nationwide.
Allyson Larcom is a Boston-based writer whose work has appeared in The Satirist and Wellesley College's Counterpoint Magazine. Follow her on twitter @allysonlarcom, or visit her website allysonlarcom.wordpress.com to find more of her writing.