Let's have a fangirl freakout over Greta Gerwig's LITTLE WOMEN (Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Laura Dern, Meryl Streep, Timothée Chalamet)

I'd rank them:

1994
1933
2019
1949
1978

and 1918?

https://news.letterboxd.com/post/187019729548/ranking-little-women

I was just googling and I hadn't even heard of this pbs version from last year that has Maya Hawke playing Jo.

didn't know there was a 1978 version, but it looks about as '70s as you can get. jan brady as beth!

Professor SHATNER

There was one last year (direct to disc/streaming?) w/Lea Thompson as Marmee.

^^Not The PBS one.

I very much did not like Gabriel Byrne as the professor in the 1994 version. He seemed a thousand years old it. It felt very weird.

Byrne aged quickly, like many Irishmen.

Wiped out after seeing this today because I spent about an hour straight in tears. This was my first exposure to the story at all, I’m assuming the dialogue was significantly modernized and or was great for that without drawing attention to itself. Really impressed with how well Pugh and the girl who played Beth played the same characters seven years apart, was almost like two completely different actresses in both cases.

if you've heard any Gerwig interviews, she incorporated a number of Alcott quotes (not from the novel) into the script.

Ah that’s interesting, I didn’t read anything about the film going in

it's one of the world's best-selling novels. Get over it!

I've seen every version, and the women are archetypes more than characters. This is fine.

It’s fine if that’s what you were expecting when you went in; I was not. Given the breathless and universal praise, it seems worth noting that this is - in addition to being spectacularly acted and wonderfully filmed - a bit of a soggy morality play and occasionally boring for it.

But i suppose it does say fangirl in the title.

Seen more than one criticism that the film doesn’t do enough to get you invested in the characters if you’re not familiar with the story but I don’t think it’s such a sin to expect the audience to know the story already.

This was exactly my experience: no familiarity with the story, took about a half hour before I was really drawn in. Maybe there is a version of this movie where we are given a little more time with the individual characters before we have the (enjoyable) scenes of them talking over each other. Or maybe that doesn't work. I still thought it was a great movie and would probably enjoy the first half hour more on a rewatch

And here's our Armond!

In this way, Gerwig bests Sofia Coppola. Coppola’s Civil War remake The Beguiled was half-heartedly misandrist, so Gerwig promotes the idea that women can have it all — including a sexy, exotic husband (played by Louis Garrel, hipster cinema’s default dreamboat). While Gerwig features the flummery of period picture luxe, she misses the bold Caucasian eroticism that made Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides peculiarly compelling.

Instead, Gerwig goes for arty effects. Just as Noah Baumbach imitated Bergman and Truffaut in Marriage Story, Gerwig imitates Alain Resnais through time-shift edits connecting the publication of Jo’s first book to memories of her family’s history. She gets away with this odd sophisticated device by maintaining emphasis on feminist resentment.

March family matriarch Marmee (Laura Dern) gets the film’s thesis statement: “I’m angry really every day of my life, but for 40 years I try not to let it get the best of me.” It sounds suspiciously defensive, like Dern’s blasphemous speech in Baumbach’s Marriage Story, and syncs with both Jo and Amy asserting, “Don’t tell me marriage isn’t an economic proposition!”

5
If these pussyhat speeches weren’t bad enough, Gerwig momentarily looks beyond herself to have Marmee lecture a black hospital worker: “I spent my whole life ashamed of my country.” It’s a Michelle Obama speech to which the token black character responds: “No offense; you should still be ashamed!” Never mind those who died in the Civil War defending Emancipation, the audacity of Gerwig’s literary update is to blend cultural illiteracy with feminist blandishment. Gerwig, Baumbach, Ronan, Chalamet and Dern represent a vanguard of genuine cynicism.

thanks for the dn Armond

btw the "angry" line from Marmee is in the book

maybe AW should read it

and he got "pussyhat" into NRO.

FEminiSt rEseNTmeNt was the name of my band in 1868.

gabriel byrne is bad in everything and nearly everything he's in is also bad

https://media0.giphy.com/media/63Ijq8ylsxUEjweGLd/source.gif

fwiw he was 44 in the Gillian Armstrong version

Shatner was older in that TV mini

Louis Garrel remains absurdly hot.

corrected, they both only seemed hundreds of years older than Jo. I only know this new guy playing the professor from The Dreamers.

He’s got a good head of hair

I would love for AW to review Anne of Green Gables.

ugh, that armond white review makes me wanna like this more

FWIW I've seen many people criticize the book on exactly the same grounds that White is. That said, the book is what it is. You can utterly 100% dispense of things like this from the 'canon' or any appreciation, or you don't have to.

Just about every film adaptation improves on the book.

Saw this today & loved it so much

The jumbled up chronology was a plus for me - it was exciting to see the story reframed differently and it made the payoff with the ending very satisfying

Ronan’s Jo was great - hard to fuck up that character but she brought great fire & heart & sadness in equal measure. Pugh’s Amy was much more enjoyable & a more humanized sister, she felt like too much of a villain carciature in Dunst’s portrayal of her.

Praise the lord for Louis Garrel’s Friedrich, what a casting choice. Never fully took to Byrne in the Armstrong version, it was way too on-the-nose paternal

And Chalamet’s Teddy was perfect. So languid & mischevious & adoring.

I loved the look, the color palette was freaking gorgeous & the set decoration & costuming just downright exquisite. The beach scene looked like a Seurat painting, I died.

Speaking of dying - the moment when Jo sees Marmie & realizes Beth is gone & whole theater is deep in their feelings, some old man in the back row says loudly “SHE DIED?”
my friend & immediately started laughing like “Ffs dude catch up”

*Marmee

Ronan's handled her career so well.

Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet both perform in a way that makes me feel more alive by way of sympathy with the amount of life they bring to every movement.

beautifully put

Speaking of dying - the moment when Jo sees Marmie & realizes Beth is gone & whole theater is deep in their feelings, some old man in the back row says loudly “SHE DIED?”
my friend & immediately started laughing like “Ffs dude catch up”

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Saturday, 28 December 2019 bookmarkflaglink

Well done for being one step ahead of some random lol.

Anyway watched this last night and if Garrel had any taste he would've hated her book and gone to California.

xpost oh cmon dude 95% of the audience knew she was dead!

The most depressing part of LITTLE WOMEN (1869) is not when Beth dies but when Jo's short story wins a prize of $100, reminding any fellow writers reading the book that freelance rates have remained roughly stable SINCE THE RECONSTRUCTION ERA

— Jennifer Morrow (@jenniferemorrow) December 27, 2019

sad lol

So did I! Found the comment iffy because I loathed the film, I guess.

XP best bit was the negotiations for better conditions/deal for her book in the end lol.

From that review:

"Gerwig imitates Alain Resnais through time-shift edits connecting the publication of Jo’s first book to memories of her family’s history. She gets away with this odd sophisticated device by maintaining emphasis on feminist resentment."

The time shifts are incredibly light and are pretty standard fare now - not even worth putting that reference in, and even so the technical achievement very rarely carries a film by itself.

Can't even competently hate.

only a publication as irredeemable as national review would still run a writer as vile as armond white has become

Lol aren't the "memories" at the end mostly fiction? All that golden pap simply Jo's cynical imagination? Of the last scenes only the ones in the great light of the new York publishing house are "real.'

Loved every minute of this. Of course the acting is excellent across the board, but I particularly enjoyed Pugh (a tricky role) and Dern. Though my wife and I did turn to each other after to confirm that as much as we love him as an actor, it's hard to see Bob Odenkirk in period garb and not think it's a bit.

Oh, and also, one of my daughters is struggling with a really bad cold. Her medicine wore off toward the end, so she had to dramatically stifle a sneezing fit right around when Beth died ... and it came out as this hilarious squeak that sent her, me and my other daughter into a barely contained fit of hysterics at the exact wrong time. I literally had tears running down my cheeks, but for all the wrong reasons. It took the three of us maybe two minutes to get our shit together, right as the movie hit peak sad. I felt so bad.

Dern was such a great choice for Marmee. She is so good at carrying multiple emotions & yet she has that beautiful looseness about her... she’s the best

 hard to see Bob Odenkirk in period garb and not think it's a bit.


I just now occurred to me that Odenkirk is now known to so many people who have no idea Mr. Show even existed

Another Gaze dissents

Reviewers have rushed to celebrate Gerwig’s Little Women, arguing that it shows that “dreams and ambitions can be greater and more soaring than Louisa May Alcott, trapped in the 19th century and kicking against it, could ever have hoped”. Really? As an adaptation, the film enacts few interpretive and material shifts for women. Meg stays dull, Amy irritating, and Beth dead. What does this lofty praise – so keen to find feminist value and demonstrate progress – say about the current culture of feminism? For all its modern chat and sass, Gerwig’s feminist vision is nostalgic, its structural back-and-forth rose-tinted. In Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic, Belén Vidal argues that period drama relishes in the “spectacle of pastness and its intricate signs” but also notes that in period film “pastness appears disconnected from the (historical) past by an aesthetic of surfaces” and this feels true of Little Women’s most spectacular scenes. In the vast New England landscapes or within the grand house of Mr. Laurence we are disconnected from History per-se and plunged into a free-floating aesthetic of association. Christmas scenes evoke Robert Frost, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods and Thomas Kinkade, a non-specific, idealised past. This sense of spectacular familiarity is common to adaptation and Gerwig plays on this through visual references to Armstrong’s Little Women, re-assembling the March sisters and their mother, Marmee (Laura Dern), in the same fireside poses. Through this referencing, Gerwig takes us out of History and into a hyper-constructed past, a mise-en-abyme that links her Little Women back to Armstrong, to Alcott and to the Little Women culture industry, bringing the viewer, through its self-reflexive system of citation, into a temporal loop between past and present. This is paralytic. With an ironising retrospective gaze, Little Women falls in line with what Owen Hatherley calls the “ironic-authoritarian-consumerist dreamworld” of the nostalgia industry which simplifies, limits and depoliticises the past for easy consumption in the modern marketplace. Little Women is marketed and will likely appeal to young people – young women. It’s sad, then, that this is a version without real consistent anger, that gives occasional voice to the rage of Jo and Marmee but which wraps up their fury in a linen shawl by the close of each scene, the bright scenery and music propelling them inexorably towards happiness. Sarah Ahmed’s Killjoy Manifesto highlights the “political utility of happiness” that is used to “justify social norms and social goods”, suggesting we should celebrate the figure of the feminist killjoy who disturbs normative happiness to assert herself. Is Jo a killjoy? Was Alcott? In the original book their rage pushes against their world, but Gerwig’s character’s anger, although articulated verbally, barely builds beyond each scene, dissipating into the spectacle, given no object or oxygen to keep it alive.

In an interview with Film Comment, Gerwig describes how she took material from Alcott’s other work and added her own flourishes. A line from a different monologue that went “Women have minds, as well as just heart; ambition and talent, as well as just beauty. And I’m so sick of people saying love is all a woman is fit for” is embellished with the additional clause: But I’m so lonely. In Gerwig’s Little Women, Jo says this to her mother in a monologue following Beth’s death. For Gerwig, this was a modern tweak that served to highlight the hardships of living ahead of your time, which she links to her own feelings of loneliness as a writer – “I was alone.” Yet far from instilling a sense of sisterly solidarity across time, her tinkering injects a sense of isolation and atomisation: anger becomes sadness, individuality becomes loneliness. The opening title of Gerwig’s film is also an edited quote from Alcott, “I’ve had lots of troubles, so I write jolly tales”, taken from an entry in her diaries where she discusses novel writing with a fellow female author. The rest of the quote, cut by Gerwig, continues, “and we wondered why we each did so” – a crucial clause that reframes individual feeling as a structural cultural issue, undermining the twee naivety of the first pronouncement. Gerwig’s editing of Alcott’s writing incises the radical doubt and nuance that characterised Alcott’s approach – it is a misrepresentation, a false justification for the jollity that follows. Lauded for taking the original “to new feminist heights”, Gerwig’s Little Women in fact fails to engage with the proto-feminist spirit of the original, let alone the radical potential for which a modern adaptation might allow. Instead, the film imbricates a knowing irony, a self-aware stylisation, into the fabric of the original text, but leaves the central tropes of the novel intact. The commitment to re-shaping, rather than re-writing the narrative and ideology of the original means that Gerwig’s Little Women remains a celebration of compromise, rather than radical fulfilment.

what would be won or lost here if this was re-cut to be played out linearly? I actually ask because I was watching it with my mother, who loved the book as a child, but she was clearly confused and therefore didn't enjoy it. She's 85 though and often struggles with flashbacks etc. in film. She doesn't have alzheimers or anything related but I do wish I could watch a linear version of this with my mother. Ofc this is just me, I'm not saying it shouldn't have been made this way.

Chris Cooper is the absolute jewel in this version. I cried during a few of his scenes.

Perfect to re-watch this after The Shop Around the Corner.

rewatched tonight & introduced Mr Veg to the wonderful world of the Marchs

mr veg liked it a good deal! i knew he would because it is charming af

and I am so still deeply in love with it that i may watch it again tomorrow

also will go to cvs tomorrow to find a box hairdye similar to jo’s hair in the movie because i crave disappointment lol

chalamet is so 👌🏻👌🏻👌🏻

I have just watched this, wrapped in a blanket, it is a literal comfort blanket film for me. Saoirse’s eyes after Beth dies! The way Pugh throws the popcorn when the dad comes back! That heartbreaking scene where Laurie told Jo he married Amy!

Ah, it’s so great still. I think I will be watching this one for many years to come. And Chris Cooper is such a great Mar Laurence.

My only complaint is that Bob Odenkirk was a real weird choice for the dad. Chris Cooper was indeed great though.

I am rereading the book after many decades

my mental pictures for the characters are a mashup of the Gillian Jacobs & Greta Gerwig movies - this is how it breaks down in my imagination currently

Winona Ryder = Jo
wotsername Hermione = Meg
Claire Danes = Beth
Florence Pugh = Amy (but sometimes Kirsten Dunst ie when Jo cuts her hair & Amy gasps YOUR ONE BEAUTY I always hear in Dunst’s voice)
Susan Sarandon = Marmee
Odenkirk = Father
Timotheeeee = Teddy/Laurie
Cooper = Mr Laurence
Louis Garrel - Friedrich but only bc i am happier picturing him being hot instead of crusty

and the reason I think i picture Odenkirk is not his look but his voice? i hear Bob’s gravelly voice in the words of father. i think the casting does work but we just dont get many scenes w him unfortunately. if there was more of him, like the long scene in the book where he tells the girls what they mean to him & how theyve grown i think it would make more sense & it IS legit weird seeing him in the movie no argumenr

My only complaint is that Bob Odenkirk was a real weird choice for the dad. Chris Cooper was indeed great though.

oh i thought the reason for the bump here was the "lou alcott was a trans man" viral thread

"LOL it's Bob Odenkirk!" did take me out of the movie but it was such a rush that I wouldn't have had it any other way.

Do we have high hopes for the Barbie movie?

oh i thought the reason for the bump here was the "lou alcott was a trans man" viral thread

― Kate (rushomancy), Sunday, May 1, 2022 2:07 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

hate this thread, nice as it seems, made by a chronic internet charlatan

lol when jo reveals she cut off her hair and everyone gasps and amy says "your one beauty!"

my favorite line