AndrewBloom
CONTAINS SPOILERS7/10 5 months ago
[7.4/10] I don’t blame director Gillian Armstrong or screenwriter Robin Swicord for the flaws in the 1994 adaptation of *Little Women*. The problems with the film come right from the source material. The first half of the movie, roughly corresponding to the first volume of Louisa May Alcott’s seminal American novel, is glorious: an exercise in lived-in cinematic naturalism and the joys of home that befit the literature the film pulls from. And the second half is awash in baffling, off-putting choices that all but sink the film’s narrative, even though it’s dutifully taken from Alcott’s own plotting.
The story of the March sisters growing up in a New England town, hard on their luck but rich in spirit and undeterred in their generosity, is worth the price of admission. The fact that the first half of the story is bookended by Christmas celebrations is not the only reason this film has become a perennial watch for the holiday season. The snowy northeastern climes are matched by the warmth of the March homestead, full of familial support, casual and cheeky fun, and love that abides through hardships and other bumps in the road.
The peak of this is the bond among the sisters, who are very much at play through their upbringing. It’s a delight to watch them roughhousing, putting on plays, and fretting and primping and scoffing ahead of grand social events. One of the central ideas of *Little Women* is the happiness and solace of home, something protagonist Jo is desperate to hang onto despite the irrepressible winds of change. Her desire wouldn’t land with such force if the audience didn’t share it. The vignettes on display, bringing family squabbles but enduring bonds among the four sisters and their kind but self-possessed mother to the fore, sell you on why Jo would be so eager to preserve this domestic bliss, no matter what it took.
But part of that is Laurie, grandson of the Marches’ wealthy neighbor who becomes Jo’s prime playmate and eventual jilted suitor. Part of the fun of those early interludes at Orchard House comes from the fact that the whole family, Jo in particular, casts off the shackles of polite society. Laurie is their confederate in that. He joins them in breaking away from convection and following their precepts and principles instead. Sometimes that means treating the less fortunate with kindness and consideration, and sometimes that means palling around in the attic putting on shows for one another or simply laughing at the ridiculousness of high society balls in back rooms.
The irony, of course, is that Jo and Laurie each want what the other has. Jo is constantly bristling against the limitations placed on women of the time and the standards of the moneyed class, and yearns for the freedom that wealthy men in society have to make their own destinies. Laurie, for his part, loathes the pressures and strictures that come from having to live up to his family’s flush expectations for a male heir, and wants nothing more than to enjoy the frivolity and warmth of the March home. In that “Grass is always greener” dichotomy they feel like kindred spirits.
So they weather the storms of small town life in New England, from sisterly spats and parties gone wrong, to parents injured in war and sisters sick with scarlet fever. And yet, the strength of family and community win out, as the Marches and their friends and allies band together when they most need support, and see everyone to a happy, healthy, yuletide reunion that warms the heart and soothes the soul.
And if the film had ended there, it’d be hard to find fault with it. But as it launches into volume two of Alcott’s novel, the cracks begin to form and the narrative begins to crater. The back half of the film isn’t all bad. Eldest sister Meg’s marriage to Mr. Brooke, a far cry from her dreams of opulence, comes with its trials, but also with the quotidian joys of a love match and supportive partner. And of course, Beth’s passing, a reminder to Jo of the joys of her youth worth preserving in whatever form she can, is poignant and moving, fueled by a wonderful performance from a young Claire Daines.
But the film’s plot shifts away from the hustle and bustle of the March family home, and everything else comes tumbling down with it. In a scene that remains heartbreaking in any adaptation, Jo spurns Laurie’s proposal. That in and of itself isn’t a bad call. Jo never seemed interested in marriage, and Alcott purportedly wanted Jo to become a “spinster” like her.
The problem is that *Little Women* seems to want the audience to take Jo’s protests that they’d never work together at face value. She declares that they’d argue and never have peace, when all we’ve ever seen is the two of them laughing like hyenas together, delighting in one another’s company, and occasionally seeming like the only two members of the crew who truly understand one another.
If you want to establish that they’re somehow wrong for each other, it needs to be shown, not told, and all this adaptation ever offers is the two getting along like nobody’s business only to shunt them off to two separate relationships that aren’t just less endearing, but are instead, downright creepy.
Alcott once declared that she would never give into pressure to pair Jo off with Laurie and instead wanted to give her protagonist a “funny match”. Well, it doesn’t get funnier than Jo and Friedrich, the German professor she meets at a boarding house in New York. On the one hand, Friedrich plays like a cheap wish-fulfillment trophy. He’s a well-traveled man of letters who just so happens to like the same thinkers/artists that Jo likes and whisks her away to operas and intellectual debates and other things she’s dreamed of for ages.
But on the other, he’s kind of repugnant. His tone is often one of condescension, which rings unpleasant. He rejects the genre stories Jo loves to write as frivolous, a pretentiousness that's never a good look. And most of all, he has more of a fatherly vibe with Jo than a romantic one, which is downright uncomfortable. Friedrich’s actor, Gabriel Byrne, is two decades older than the young Wynona Ryder, which, while not unusual for the time period, makes their match seem awkward. There’s an implicit power imbalance in play, and a paternalism that Friedrich shows toward Jo that make it difficult, if not impossible to latch onto their romance, particularly given the age difference. I literally shivered when they shared their first kiss.
The beta pairing matches Laurie with Amy, Jo’s youngest sister. There too, the film spends most of its time with Laurie played by twenty-year-old Christian Bale and Amy played by twelve-year-old Kirsten Dunst, who reads as even younger. There’s nothing wrong with that when Laurie is simply one of the March sisters’ playmates. Dunst is a young powerhouse here, giving a performance full of pip and personality that belies her years. And the dynamic between them in the first half is sweet, with Laurie seeming very much the nurturing big brother.
But when the time jump happens, and Laurie starts hitting on a four-years-older version of Amy, it’s just as uncomfortable to see that fraternal intimacy turned into a fractured attempt at romantic intimacy. It doesn't help that Samantha Mathis, who plays the grown up Amy, lacks any of the spark Dunst brought to the role.
Still, the real fault is in the story itself. In one charged, compelling scene, Amy tells off Laurie and declares that she doesn’t want to be married as a substitute for her sister or an entree into the March family. Laurie replies that Amy’s putative fiancee probably feels the same way about someone marrying him for his money. And really, those harsh but accurate truths should have been the end of it.
Instead, *Little Women* again tells rather than shows, and in the next scene, the two are simply over their disagreements and genuinely in love for some reason. It’s not implausible that two people who knew one another with one dynamic as kids could develop another, less awkward dynamic when they’re both adults. But as with Jo and Laurie’s dissolution, you need to actually show that, help the audience understand it, rather than just having Laurie resolve to change to earn Amy’s love and then declaring it so. There’s a lot of ground to cover in a two-hour movie adapting a two-volume novel, and not everything can be fully fleshed out. But justifying the romance between the obvious choice for your protagonist and his quasi-adoptive kid sister is, suffice it say, worth the real estate and creates disastrous results otherwise.
What’s frustrating is that this narrative direction could work with a different tone. One of the implicit themes of the source material is that the dreams we have in our youth don’t always align with the realities of our adulthood. There could be a tragic irony to Laurie settling for Amy as a means to join the March family, and Amy settling to be Laurie’s silver medal so that she can have the financial security he represents, only for both to taste the bitterness of a match made for practicality rather than love. Likewise, there could be equally poetic pathos to Jo latching onto an older man who seems wise in the ways of the world and intellectually rigorous, only to realize that he sees her more like a naive pet and doesn’t truly respect her. (Hello *Middlemarch* fans!)
Instead, we’re supposed to take these pairings as happily ever afters, the surprising partners that Jo and Laurie didn’t realize they needed but are blissful to have. The whole thing rings false, even setting aside the creep factor, in ways that hinder, if not hobble, the good work of Meg’s life, Beth’s death, and Jo channeling the warm feelings about her childhood into a successful writing project. That's not the fault of the writer or director. It’s all there in the original novel. But that doesn’t make the results any better on the screen.
The power and resonance of *Little Women* so many years later is in its realization of Alcott’s first volume. There it captures the same familial bliss, the same sense of lived-in tumult and closeness, the same bucking up against societal expectations that the author did, translating these elements for the screen with a welcoming air. But in its second half, the adaptation cannot fix the faults of its source material, either through the courage to change course in ways great or small, or to at least give the relationships the time and the right sort of interactions to justify turning away from one of literature’s great lost romances. There’s a reason that even Jo, Alcott’s author insert character, turns to her youth, not her adulthood, to pen her own classic.
