When the 2019 version of ‘Little Women’ was released, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see it. I have loved the books on which it was based for many years, and thoroughly enjoyed an earlier film adaptation, although it’s many years since I last saw it. But the new one, I was told, was updated for a modern audience, and had a somewhat confusing time switch, as well as some scenes that were not in Louisa May Alcott’s original.
However my son gave me the DVD of this film for my birthday a few months ago. It’s quite a long film - over two hours - so we had to find an evening when we had more than ninety minutes available. We finally sat down to watch it last night, and were hooked almost from the start.
Saoirse Ronan is excellent as Jo March. It took me a couple of scenes to accept her as Jo; I had somehow always thought of Jo as having very dark hair. But she has just the right personality. The film starts with Jo nervously knocking on the door of an editor, submitting a short story for newspaper publication. She’s told to write something more gothic and dramatic, and returns to the boarding house where she’s living.
This part of the story is in the book ‘Good Wives’, the second volume of (or sequel to) ‘Little Women’, and as the film moves forward it is interspersed with flashback scenes from seven years earlier. In the earlier scenes, Jo is just fifteen. Her older sister Meg (Emma Watson) is sixteen; their younger sisters Beth (Eliza Scanlen) and Amy (Florence Pugh) respectively thirteen and twelve.
I was a tad confused at first about which scenes were which; had I not been familiar with the story, I think I might have got lost. I realised quickly that the hairstyles changed between the two eras, and that some characters looked older. Jo succeeds, more-or-less, in demonstrating the difference between fifteen and twenty-two, although she doesn’t change all that much. That’s not a problem as it fits with her character.
Emma Watson is, in our opinion, the most skilled at playing Meg both a young married woman of twenty-three alternated with a sixteen-year-old girl who dreamed of romance. But we were less impressed with Amy who never looks twelve, although she plays the character of Amy well.
Meryl Streep has a lesser part as Aunt March, and does it brilliantly, as one would expect, looking really very old in the later scenes. And we were extremely impressed, too, with Laura Dern, who plays ‘Marmee’. I had never had much of an image of this unusual American women; I think this portrayal is exactly right.
The story is of the girls’ growing up, of Meg’s falling in love; of Laurie - their neighbour - being their best friend and thinking himself in love with Jo. It’s also about Jo’s literary struggles and successes, and about general family life. There’s quite a bit of squabbling, and the rivalry between Jo and Amy more marked than I recall from the book. But it works extremely well.
My husband has not read the books and didn’t remember having seen an earlier version of the film, but he had no trouble understanding the story, and also liked it very much. The pace was good, the scenery and costumes excellent, and despite veering significantly from the books in places, I thought it an excellent adaptation.
There are some very interesting extras, too, including a ‘making of’ documentary, where we were surprised as just how many of the cast were not American!
Very highly recommended, so long as you don’t mind when a film version of a classic book takes several deviations from the original.
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