Review: Little Women (2019)

If you’re looking for a film to carry with you long after the closing credits have rolled, this is the one. I’m not joking: it’s taken me a week to bring myself to break my reverie and come back to reality to write this review. If you want to be touched, uplifted, tickled and carried away on a rollicking wave of nostalgia and beautiful cinematography, look no further. And if you have ever had a sibling, or if you have ever put pen to paper and called yourself a writer, or experienced heartbreak or joy, you must see Little Women immediately. 

Greta Gerwig’s Little Women is, above all, a love letter to sisterhood and girlhood. It is lovingly crafted and gorgeously shot, and carries all the genuine energy and fervour of a houseful of little women navigating a world which they individually realise does not hold space for them. I also grew up in a family with four sisters (plus three brothers), and Gerwig has done an absolutely beautiful job of crafting and capturing the tumultuously warm chaos of a large, close-knit family.

As in the source material, and as in a true life family of this size, the sisters complement and foil each other in perfect rag-tag harmony: sometimes caught up in venomous hatred and jealousy, often in cahoots and playful synchronicity, and always in fierce love and kinship. Greta Gerwig has created the world of Little Women in an irresistibly warm, familiar and comforting fashion which is never twee and always wonderful. The girls in turn face the growing pains of growing up and going into the world as un-monied women, parting painfully with girlhood and their picture-perfect tableau of gleeful, carefree childhood. The film handles this flawlessly and touchingly – I defy anybody in their mid-late 20s to watch this film without feeling a pang of nostalgia for their recent yet distant youth. 

While I adore that Little Women centres the themes of sisterhood, it occasionally does so at the expense of the romantic storylines. The timeline of Jo and Professor Bhaer’s courtship is reduced dramatically, so much so that her falling for him feels jarring and abrupt, and at odds completely with her careful, measured personality and strong feelings against marriage. Likewise, there is scant attention paid to Amy’s quietly pining and enduring love for Laurie during her teenage years, so that when the revelation comes in the third act it also feels slightly underbaked.

For those not familiar with the novel, I can see how these may have felt like jarring plot points, but personally it didn’t stop me from adoring the film through and through. What I did love was how well-framed Jo and Laurie’s relationship was; it could have been very easy to inadvertently (or deliberately) inject a romantic undertone to their friendship, but he genuinely did feel like a brother and both Chalamet and Gerwig did a great job of portraying him as such. It made the moment of his proposal to Jo feel as ridiculous to the audience as it did to her – and who among us hasn’t once or twice misread a strong kinship as romantic love, right? Too relatable.

The casting in this film is a stroke of genius – the cast gels perfectly and the performances across the board are sublime. I was a little unsure about Emma Watson as Meg, but I was gladly proven wrong. Florence Pugh delighted as Amy, the slightly vain youngest March sister, and I suspect that this will be Eliza Scanlen’s breakout performance as the ever-sweet and selfless Beth, but of course it’s Saorise Ronan as Jo March who is the runaway marvel and standout performance of Little Women – Oscar nom in the bag. Timothée Chalamet was exactly as charming as you would expect, Laura Dern was warming and comforting as Marmee, and please can we talk about how hot Prof. Friedrich Bhaer was?? I even don’t mind that the film switched his nationality from German to French since it resulted in Louis Garrel.

Another little source material deviation I loved was that movie Jo opened a school for girls, whereas book Jo opens a school for boys. The overall emphasis on women’s progress and the re-feministing of elements of the plot throughout delighted me beyond measure, and not only felt truer to character for Jo somehow but also I feel truer to Louisa M. Alcott’s vision. The final scenes in which Jo negotiates the plot ending of her own work Little Women with her publisher serves as a wry nod and a smirking ‘nudge-nudge’ towards the meddling of editors in women’s work, to censor and smooth out non-traditional elements – it feels very appropriate and gloriously sarcastically meta that Gerwig has infused this very subtly more radical edge throughout Little Women. 

Reader, I cried through the entire third act. I cried for Meg, I cried for Beth, I cried for Jo and Amy. I cried for loneliness, I cried for growing up. Believe me when I say that this is a near-perfect film; it is a love letter not only to sisterhood, but to family, to joy, to imagination, to the heartache of growing up, to writing and writerly life. It is gentle, sentimental, and defiant. 

And to the writers in the room: if the penultimate scene of Jo watching her book being painstakingly and lovingly handcrafted – the type set, the pages cut, the spine stitched, the leather bound – doesn’t bring you to your knees, if the image of Jo holding her first book, her baby, in her own two hands doesn’t fill you with joy and emotion, I’m not sure we can be friends.