Greta Gerwig's Little Women (2019) is justly celebrated for its fine acting, highly intelligent and aphoristic dialogue and the sumptuous beauty of the film's costuming and photography. The picture is problematic because of the exceedingly perverse way in which the narrative is fragmented into a complex, prismatic array of short scenes, An interesting comparison may be made to Martin Scorsese's The Irishman, a movie that arranges the narrative around two periods of time posited as the present -- the protagonist's final days in a nursing home and a decisive road trip that takes DeNiro's assassin to his fatal encounter with Jimmy Hoffa; from these two structural frames the picture proceeds by leisurely flashback in a generally chronological manner. Although this narrative is complicated, the viewer is never "lost"-- rather, the viewer can keep track of what happened before and after the various moments that the film depicts. (The great length of the movie, I think, contributes to Scorsese's ability to keep the narrative clear and, even, mostly chronological despite the fact that the structure involves a flashback nested in a flashback. The Irishman is badly flawed but narrative confusion is not one of its defects. Little Women is probably a better film, more intricately imagined and more profound in its musings on the changing roles of women in society but, it must be said, the picture is very, very hard to understand as narrative -- on the simplest level, we aren't sure what comes first and what comes later. Gerwig's script fractures the story into elements that are intercut thematically -- if someone is sick, the film cuts back and forth between different occasions when the person was ill. When the four "little women" march across the screen to provide succor to the impoverished Hummel family, the director cuts to another scene of the girls marching in the opposite direction during some other moment in time. Ultimately, I wrote a note to myself that the film's structure was Proustian -- one object or recollection leads the film maker to intercut other scenes involving that same subject or some close variant on that subject. The effect is that, in order to watch this film productively, you must generally know what happens in the novel and the chronological order of events -- only armed with this information can you decipher what is occurring on-screen. The director seems to assume that everyone who pays for a ticket to this movie will have read (and loved) the book or have seen other movie versions of the story and remembered them well -- otherwise, the movie is like a superhero show or Star Wars, presented to the viewer with the notion that the audience members will have seen earlier iterations of the story. An extreme example involves Beth's illness. Beth has gone to help the impoverished Hummel family and been exposed to scarlet fever. We see her fall ill, become terribly flushed, and, even, comatose -- but, then, it's Christmas morning and Beth is no longer in bed and she seems to be better: at least, this is what Marmie announces. We have earlier seen Beth with Jo at the seaside where Beth is convalescing from an attack of the illness which has apparently decisively weakened her. Then, we see Beth succumb to the illness and die. Behind me, several women who had certainly read the novel were whispering to one another -- "it was just a dream," one of them said. But this narrative is very grounded and practical -- there are no dreams in the picture. The confusion is that we are seeing events separated by several years with no narrative integument to explain this to us. Similarly, in one scene, we are surprised to see the eldest sister, Meg, with a man in a small house -- they are discussing household finances. The scene follows an episode twenty minutes earlier in which Meg was tempted to buy some expensive silk fabric. At first, we can't figure out the identity of the man with whom Meg is speaking so intimately -- then, someone refers to their wedding and we understand that Meg and this man are married. This sequence apparently takes place some years after the Civil War although there is nothing to identify the time or place. About an hour later, we are shown Meg's wedding with her husband. This is about 15 minutes before the end of the film. What makes Little Women so challenging in this disjointed narrative format is that there is absolutely no present tense from which the flashbacks and flashforwards emanate -- that is, there is no privileged narrative that is explicated by flashbacks and flashforwards: it is all a flux of short disconnected episodes,. spanning many years and, in fact, part of the globe -- there are a number of sequences set in Paris and, possibly, London. It remains to be seen whether this narrative structure is successful on some level. Certainly, the cubist approach to time and space saps the emotional integrity of the story -- since every scene begins with our questioning when and where this is happening, we can't really identify with the characters. Gerwig's work is profoundly modernist and, as I have said, Proustian -- but it's so analytically complex that I'm not sure whether Gerwig has made a masterpiece or simply botched the film's story beyond recognition (At least, one lover of the book told me she didn't like the film because it was confusing). I think there is something to be said for both points of view. Certainly, Gerwig has distanced the film and its characters quite radically by splintering their stories in short non-chronological tableaux.
As far as I can tell, the movie involves a woman named Marmie (Laura Dern) who is the mother of four highly talented and beautiful girls. Marmie's husband, who appears late in the film in first a Union soldier's garb and, then, clerical weeds, is away serving in the Army. We hear that he has squandered some of his family's wealth by educating African-American freedmen's children. The girl's father, who is much beloved in his absence, is either wounded or becomes ill. Marmie goes to Washington to nurse him back to health. There are many scenes emphasizing Jo's literary interests -- she writes plays for the girls to perform and, later, we see her in New York City where she lives in a boarding house and publishes Gothic stories involving much violence and bodice-ripping. (The scenes in New York are our first introduction to Jo -- although this occurs chronologically a decade after the episodes at the family house in Concord, Massachusetts.) Meg, the oldest girl, marries a poor but virtuous schoolteacher. For her, marriage is the crown of existence and she is happy in her role as a wife and mother. Amy, Jo's little sister, wants to be an artist. We see her in Paris in a studio where she takes lessons and paints modestly competent impressionist canvases. Beth, the youngest daughter, plays the piano and is much beloved as a daughter-figure to a lonely and wealthy widower, Mr. Lawrence, who lives nearby. She sickens when providing charity to a family of impoverished Germans and, ultimately succumbs to her disease -- although this is after the Civil War when Amy is studying art in Paris. Mr. Lawrence has a rapscallion grandson or nephew, Laurie (as the girl's call him) -- he falls in love with the free-spirited Jo but she rejects his proposal. Later, he encounters Amy in Paris. At first, he behaves poorly, appearing at a grand Ball while completely drunk. (This scene doesn't exactly work -- Laurie's disheveled garb and drunken demeanor are so out of character for the elegant soiree that he disrupts that it is like the sudden incursion of Adam Driver or Tatum Channing or someone on that order, a young rebel without a cause, into the decorum of the 19th century setting). Later Laurie learns that Amy has always loved him from afar and they marry on the way back to Massachusetts to attend Beth's funeral. Jo's fate is more "literary" -- indeed, almost Borgesian. She becomes a character in her own novel. Early in the film, she rejects violently and with ill-temper the criticism of a German professor in New York, Friedrich Behr. Behr thinks she is traducing her talent by writing Sturm und Drang popular stories for the tabloid press. Jo is outraged by his criticism and reacts very poorly. Later, however, she writes a novel called Little Women about her experiences growing up -- the "end of childhood" as she characterizes it. When she takes the novel to the publisher, he urges her to correct the ending by having the character named "Jo" who is also the author get married. Jo reluctantly agrees although she drives a hard bargain for royalties and the copyright to her novel. She goes home and writes an ending in which Jo marries Friedrich Behr -- and, of course, this is what we see enacted in the final scenes in the movie. I liked this meta-narrative ending, which is certainly thought-provoking -- in the final scenes, we don't know whether we are in Jo's life as depicted in Little Women or in some other fictional terrain, perhaps, the life of Louisa May Alcott. In any event, the film ends with all the surviving sister's together in a large mansion house in Boston where the Amy is teaching little girls art, Friedrich tutoring children (including a Black girl) in the violin, and, presumably, Jo instructing girls in literature and, perhaps, economics. The film contains several scenes emphasizing the economic structure of women's roles in society, a subject on which the formidable Aunt March (and equally formidable red-eyed Meryl Streep) preaches at length.
The acting is first-rate and the movie is exceedingly exquisite in its appearance, becoming more and more beautiful as the film progresses. The superb camera-work invokes equally Thomas Cole, John Singer Sargent, and Winslow Homer. A sequence on the beach with the women wearing bonnets and the men elegant white hats looks exactly like something painted by Homer and the ballroom scenes with the women arrayed in exquisite silks and satins look like Sargent's dimly lit but sumptuous interiors. In one scene in Paris, Amy and Laurie converse in a garden. In the background, a woman and gentleman are seated in the shadows talking. The woman's dress is a rich and subtle purple and it's simply an extraordinary highlight, a gift to the eyes to the rear of the main characters. In another scene, Jo and Laurie descend together from a modest height overlooking their village. They fight and Laurie leaves. Jo sits in the meadow exactly aligned with a little pointed steeple a thousand yards away -- it's like an improvement on one of Thomas Cole's autumnal landscapes painted from a humble, but picturesque vantage over the landscape. This is certainly one of the most beautiful films that I have ever seen. But it can't build up any real emotional power or resonance -- no sooner do we figure out where we are in time and what has happened, then, we are posed with a fresh set of narrative riddles to solve.
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