Graphic by Callie Wohlgemuth
BY EZRI BRAID-GRIZZELL ’23
“Little Women,” Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel, has been adapted and reinterpreted hundreds of times. So why should Hollywood bother making yet another version of “Little Women” in 2019?
Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” is a clear departure from earlier versions and draws stark contrast to other book-film adaptations. Anyone can point to the refined manner and stiff speech in “Pride and Prejudice” (2005), “The Importance of Being Earnest” (2002), or even original productions such as “Downton Abbey.” But the beauty of Gerwig’s “Little Women” is that her passive camera and realistic, rough depictions of human interaction manage to completely reshape the familiar story.
Rather than speaking line by line in flowery prose, the dialogue is fast, overlapping and ultimately remind the audience that, though the characters are from post-Civil War America, they think and act like anyone in the modern day.
You might already know Greta Gerwig for her directorial debut, “Lady Bird” (2018), which won a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture for a Musical or Comedy, among numerous other awards. If you’ve seen “Lady Bird,” you know that the film more than deserved its accolades. The film is less of a structured story with beats, plot and set events, but more of a sequence of moments in a high school girl’s life that just happen to be captured. “Lady Bird” is not just a story —it is the camera’s eyewitness account of the main character’s life.
Gerwig goes further than she did in “Lady Bird,” with “Little Women.” Rather than starting from the beginning of the story and working straight to the end, the film picks up at two different times. At one point, the four sisters are grown and living out of the house, each with her own life and career. At another moment, the girls all live at home, seven years in the past. These jumps continue throughout the movie, juxtaposing the warm orange and yellow tones of the past with the colder grey and blues of the harsher present. It’s an easy way to distinguish the timelines. But as the movie goes on, colors slowly start to slip together. Timelines converge, the past catching up with the beginning of the present. A screen that was covered with black clothed figures suddenly gives way to a background of yellow flowers.
Perhaps the best moment in the film is when present suddenly cuts to future, in which a suit-clad Jo presents her “Little Women” manuscript to her publisher who demands her to make a change to the ending. “Fine,” she says. The film cuts back to present, but you can’t help but notice that the screen is bathed in warm orange. It’s a subtle change, but it begs the question: was everything else in warm colors some form of fiction too?
It’s impossible to close a review of the film without talking about this very suit-clad Jo. “I can’t get over my disappointment in being a girl,” Jo proclaims quite early on in the film. It’s hard not to notice her closet of vests, suit jackets and skirts significantly less full than anything worn by other female characters. Jo does not want to marry and Louisa May Alcott, the author of the original book, never wanted her to either.
For someone who isn’t looking for it, the solution Gerwig found won’t be quite clear. But as the world comes around into more acceptance of LGBTQ people and characters, it’s hard to ignore the anomalies of Jo’s wardrobe and the inclusion of certain lines.
Gerwig presents Jo as a queer woman, able to live her life to the fullest in post-war America. Though it’s not blatant, the subtext is there and it brings me hope for future adaptations of other classics.
In the past few decades, understanding of sexuality, gender and mental illness has grown by leaps and bounds. I hope that we can use it to understand and interpret classics better in the future. The characters are human, not just stiff models of witty prose.
I hope that Gerwig’s “Little Women” is only the beginning of understanding all classic figures from literature as such.