Little Women Review (1/22/2020)

Greta Gerwig’s Little Women is the first exposure to this story that I’ve had – I’ve not read the book nor seen any of the other six film adaptations, so that is the lens through which I will be reviewing this film. From this film alone I’m not convinced that film is really the right medium for this story. There’s quite a lot going on for a two hour run time, and while character driven dramas like this require moments of lingering introspection and meditation, there’s less time for this than the story really needs. The result is a film without much breathing room, one that seems to race along at a breakneck pace relative to how it seems to want to go. The first half especially often feels very jumbled, and it was especially difficult to tell which scenes were flashbacks and which character was which for the first half hour or so. Because of this, I could never get truly invested in the story or characters, despite overall liking what I was seeing.

The silver lining here is that as Little Women goes on, it does get better, and even in the beginning there’s quite a lot to like. The cinematography works well with the flashback-driven dual-narrative structure, with scenes of childhood in the past bathed in a warm, dreamlike glow that brings with it comfort and whimsy, and scenes of adulthood suffused with a chill, lonely palette of blues and whites and greys. While the transitions between the current narrative and flashbacks of the past can often be jarring, once you pick up on the differences it’s easy to determine when they happen, as the images lay the foundation for the story marvelously.

This story is quite a delightful one, taking four extremely likeable characters played brilliantly by Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Emma Watson and Eliza Scanlen. While many of these faces are familiar ones (Emma Watson indeed is practically a household name), they do a remarkable job at disappearing into their characters, and they all feel like they really belong in the post-Civil War period. The costumes and set design take the sense of immersion miles, and there’s an impressive attention to detail on display here that really sucks the viewer in and makes the setting feel vibrant and alive. The story itself is one that is at times both melancholy and uplifting, heartbreaking and liberating, as it follows four women coming of age and exploring and finding their identities in a world that does its best to restrict the autonomy of women and tell them exactly who they are supposed to be. There’s quite a lot of nuance to it, and it’s a story that, despite being written over a century ago, still feels relevant today, as women still lack many of the same opportunities as men, despite the massive strides in progress that have been made in that time.

As a trans woman, this film was an especially refreshing experience after coming out and exploring my own gender identity in a year where much of the big hit movies were dominated by men. Much of the cinema I’d been consuming (and I will admit I am to some degree to blame for this) was written by men about men, and while this did not affect my enjoyment of those movies, it did leave my own experiences relating to them in a very weird spot. Little Women helped to provide a counter to that, showing me women with lives and ambitions that I could relate to, and celebrated femininity and sisterly bonds in a way that helped me to form a more clear vision of what I wanted for myself and my identity, particularly as it related to other people. It also sent me into somewhat of a dysphoric episode afterwards, but that’s a bit too personal for me to go into at the moment and it’s not a problem with the movie itself so much as with how I personally interacted with it.

Overall, Little Women really is hindered by how overstuffed it is, causing its emotional points to feel less earned and less resonant overall. It really needed more breathing room, and in today’s era of streaming and high budget television I’m of the opinion that this would have worked much better as a mini-series. But, as it is, Little Women is mostly a success regardless; a well directed, well shot and well acted experience telling a relevant and poignant family drama about the lives and identities of women.