Little Women (2019)

Just a warning: This post has little or nothing to do with my books on Smashwords.

L-R: Beth March [Scanlen], Jo March [Ronan],
Meg March [Watson], Amy March [Pugh]

A few nights ago, I watched Little Women starring Laura Dern, Saoirse Ronan, Meryl Streep, and numerous others.

First of all, I have read Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men, the main books that form part of a single connected story, and read them often, and so I know my way around the narrative extremely well.  Bear that in mind, when I wax critical about this latest movie.

First and formost, I see numerous matters that concern the author, Louisa May Alcott.  Anyone, with any sort of observation and sensitivity who lived at that time--even without the history of the world since that time to illuminate their thinking--could have had similar concerns:

* The status of women, who were under the control of their menfolk.  Many women--if not all women--could see the unfairness of this state of affairs.  But especially in times of war, it was more glaringly obvious that men, and male politicians and legislators made matters worse than they already were, though there may have been a few wonderful leaders of the masculine gender.

* The fact that women were consigned to certain tasks and responsibilities, which kept them out of the running in tasks and responsibilities that were far more important, which were jealously controlled by inept men.

* The fact that no matter how brilliant, a typical woman had no access to higher learning, no matter how well fitted she may have been to have the world of knowledge opened to her.  Women needed access to knowledge both in order to make a difference in the social and political sphere, and also in order to follow their instincts and their thirst for knowledge in any area.

* The fact that women had to subject themselves to often quite unreasonable demands of their husbands to bear large numbers of children.

* Alcott was painfully aware of the sorry plight of poor immigrants.  Whether or not this was a central concern of hers I do not know--reading her personal papers could tell us the answer to that--but she certainly brought up the matter in Little Women, and presented the death of Beth March as a direct consequence of the lack of medical care available to the Hummel family.  Another factor was:

* The poor state of public health practices at the time, and sanitation standards.  It is hard to tell whether Alcott was sufficiently far seeing to imagine what would be possible in the future.

* The limitations of poverty.  The March family, while certainly better off than the Hummels, still looked upon the Lawrences next door, and their Aunt March, with envy.

A unifying theme in the context of all these concerns, is the powerlessness of women, even if it does not have a direct bearing on every single one of these items.  Certainly being a woman made everything so much worse, if you had to have a connection between, say, the Hummels and female powerlessness.  It seemed that the Hummels were a family headed by a woman, and such a family would usually be worse off in every respect than a family led by a man.

However, I think that, to make Little Women a monothematic piece of work would be to do it an enormous disservice.  Directors with a vision often think that, in making a movie out of a book, it is impossible to convey more than a single important point.  I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the main driving force behind the Little Women (2019) project, Greta Gerwig, subscribed rather too enthusiastically to the belief that Louisa M. Alcott's governing concern was feminism, which seems to have resulted in a very heavy-handed use of the flashback technique.  Never before in the history of mankind has so much flashback been resorted to, with such confusing effect.  To follow what was going on, you had to have known the story intimately already, and you had to keep track of what the lighting was, how long someone's hair was, and so on.  Ms. Gerwig may have succeeded in elucidating the motivations for various actions by backing them up with flashbacks, so, OK, motivations in this movie might have been a trifle easier to understand than in earlier Little Women movies.  But the thread of the story really suffers.

There were brilliant moments.  Beautiful visuals, gorgeous costumes, scenes improved by realistic acting.  But it was difficult to follow the thread of the story; and I fear that only those who knew the story, and were desperately trying to salvage something from the temporal confusion, would have made the effort to thread their way through the spaghetti.

An interesting turn of events is that Professor Bhaer, the gentleman who eventually wins the heart of Jo March, has only a few minutes on screen.  This is explained by presenting the happy ending to the story (the consummation of the love affair of Jo and Bhaer) as being an unwelcome result of undue pressure being brought to bear by the publisher.

I suppose I'm too much of a lover of the original stories, and the author, L. M. Alcott, in my own superficial way, I suppose, to appreciate the deconstruction, and the painful reconstruction of the story by Greta Gerwig.  If there had only been two time periods between which the camera switches, it might have worked.  But sometimes Gerwig switches between three, or more.  I have a horrible suspicion that the actual flashback she wanted was between the scene at the publisher's office, and Jo's scramble to intercept Bhaer before he leaves for New York; all the other flashbacks were (I believe) merely a means to convey legitimacy on that final one.

I should talk.  I have wielded flashback ruthlessly in my stories.  But I freely confess that it was due to my ineptness as an author.  Well, perhaps one day, a Director's Cut will be made available to us, where the flashbacks are handled more delicately, or hopefully, eliminated.

Kay