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

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.

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.

Sentences like these inspire me to write, "Whiney G. Winegarten" otm

Don't know Scanlen so didn't know she was Australian, but that means all four girls were played by not American actors, which is kind of neat.

xposts Dissents like that are so obnoxious, because at the very least the film is exceptionally well acted and directed and if not radical still very well adapted, which really is or should be enough. It's a joy, which we can always use more of, too middlebrow or whatever or not.

I think taking exception to ppl proclaiming it as a cutting edge feminist vision is fine.

Yeah I mean it seems otm, good movie tho

I'm not sure I've read any reviews, tbh. Are there many reviews that claim it's a cutting edge radical feminist film? I mean, I believe it, but I doubt it.

There's one cited in the first sentence of that quote, for starters.

Where's the quote from?

I'd say the Guardian review quoted in the first line is rather poorly written, period.

Another Gaze review is very otm. Enjoy the look, see there is nothing much beyond that too.

Really liked how it didn't even talk about the men they marry lol.

I saw an Anthony Lane piece in The New Yorker that talked about the cast. Really boring.

armond white > anthony lane

What’s less clear, however, is whether she manages to update its vision of feminism for the 21st century.

Should she?

I haven't seen this version yet but going by some of the reviews I am getting confused that it's set in the present because of lines like that ^^^.

For a lot of the country, it's still entirely a radical idea that a woman doesn't desire marriage or kids or playing caretaker for the men in the family.

I mean, how do you update an adaptation of a story from the late 1800s, set in the late 1800s, for the 21st century? Give them lasers?

Have Letters to Cleo perform on the roof of the high school.

I kind of lol'd at the Another Gaze bit that criticises the lack of consistent anger or rage in Little Women.

Jo could have been a prolific tweeter.

i am the most feminist little woman (2019) pic.twitter.com/ietTbpUAuI

— Eva Victor (@evaandheriud) August 14, 2019

this is neat

I love this detail from the Hollywood Reporter directors' roundtable. https://t.co/D54lDjml20 pic.twitter.com/S5q7l57XKG

— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) December 24, 2019

Enjoy how this thread went from largely positive to discourse about whether the film is feminist enough (ffs)!

Anyway saw this and really liked it. But then I have loved the books since childhood and my original one is read to tatters, so I’m obviously not the brilliantly objective reviewer I need to be here. Saw it with one of my sisters and my mother and one of her sisters. Cinema was full of women and groups of girls. I saw all these groups of girls downstairs and thought they were going to Frozen 2; they were not.

Enjoyed the timeskips but then there are few nonlinear narratives I don’t like. Sense of the bond between the sisters is real, but I totally get people not familiar saying it seemed shallow. It’s always the difficulty with book adaptations, isn’t it? Your time to establish the characters, their world and their bonds is in minutes rather than hours.

I wasn’t mad for Ladybird so I can’t remember if the quick cuts and rapid pace are her signatures? Felt I could have done with more lingering, some of it came across as like one of those YouTube montage of a whole film in five minutes.

Superbly cast, obviously; I enjoyed the scene between Jo and Mr Laurence after Beth’s death, and Florence Pugh was just great throughout. She was so Amy it hurt, down to her ridiculous outbursts.

Saoirse was incredible, her energy holds the whole thing together when it gets a bit patchy and I really enjoyed the scene of her negotiating for her book at the end others have already mentioned.