Little Women (2019) is based on a popular novel which depicts the lives of four sisters from childhood to womanhood. It is a coming-of-age film alternating between the present time of the film (post civil war USA) and their childhood (during the civil war). This narrative technique effectively highlights the contrast between the girls' tight-knitted relationship in their younger days and the time after the civil war where they all lived separate lives. A tragic event, the youngest sister falling ill, reunited the four sisters. This reunion brought up some past grudges but also allow the sisters to reconnect, now with greater maturity. All of this is told through a clever interweaving of the past and the present, where themes of memories, childhood, growing up and women's gender roles are explored.
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The film wouldn't be what it is without the brilliant performances. The all-too-real bonding of the cast allows us, for that brief two hours and fifteen minutes, to fully immerse ourselves in the journeys of the sisters. It felt like we grew up with them. We understand the paths each of the girls' chose to take and how these diverging paths reflected their personal beliefs and aspirations. We root for them to succeed in their own ways but also for them to reunite as a family and forgive one another. The colour grading of the film seamlessly transport us back and forth between the two timelines: warm tones for the past, cool tones for the present. We see how events in the past influences the the characters in the present.
Unlike many famous films nowadays, director Greta Gerwig did not try to play up the feminist message. She told the story as it is. In a time where popular films tackling gender inequality only do so to capitalise on Third Wave Feminism and the #METOO movement, the true meanings of said movements become lost or trapped in a sea of commercialised glamour and meaningless imageries. Messages become mere representations and symbols, hoping to pass off as iconic. The oversimplification of content creates a divide between those who agree and those who do not. The divide grows as each side are torn further apart by feelings of repulse for the other side's perceived irrationality.
Hence, it is truly refreshing to see a straightforward retelling of a story about women's struggles. In Little Women, we see the women fight for their dreams. The protagonist, Jo March, is trying to get her work published in the male-dominated publishing industry. The big sister, Meg, is a proud and contented housewife. The younger sister, Amy, is an aspiring painter who hopes to be loved and respected, but more importantly distinguished from her sister. Despite how decades have gone by since Louisa May Alcott wrote this book, we can still see a bit of us in each of the girls. This is what makes the film so much more relevant and hard-hitting.
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The conflict of what is expected of women and what the sisters truly want is a struggle shared by women from all eras and from all over the world. Sure, it's easier now for women to publish a book or be a painter, but the inequality still exist. Hence, Jo March's arch is more universal than we think.
In a scene that marks the climax of the film, Jo experiences a tragic loss. Her willpower and passion couldn't save her family. For the first time, she realised that so much has changed. She can no longer garner the feelings of warmth, care and companionship from her family- something she thought would never change. She is truly lost. In this scene, Saoirse Ronan delivers one of the most heart-wrenching performance I have ever seen in 2019.
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"Women, they have minds and they have souls as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition and they’ve got talent as well as just beauty. I am so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it." - Jo March (Saoirse Ronan)
Jo's ambition to break free from gender stereotypes and pursue her dream is worn down by series of tragic events and the hostile dismissal of her work by the male-dominated industry. In this moment of despair, everything seemed so bleak. Jo wants nothing more than to be loved and taken care of. She, like many of us, yearns for that security. Many times, we reach our lowest points, where we are tempted to just give up and take the easy way out. This, in Jo's case, is to marry Theodore Laurence (played by Timothée Chalamet) despite not actually loving him.
"But, do you love him?" Marmee asked.
"I care more to be loved." Jo replied.
We know that taking the easy route would not make us happy and deep down Jo does too. The road to success is not impossible, it is just incredibly lonely.
Through a beautiful sequence aided by perfectly coordinated music score and top-notch performances by each of the actors, Gerwig shows how Jo rose from her lowest point to success, inspiring us to do the same.
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Gerwig includes a hyper-realistic quality to the ending. It is unclear if Jo March did marry Friedrich Bauer in the ending of this film. We know for a fact that in the book Little Women, she did. And the author most likely did it for the sake of getting her book published and making it worth selling, as the publisher puts it. A lot of times in the creative industry, little tweaks to the true story are necessary to make the final product more compelling, sensational and marketable.
In the past, female characters always end up either married or dead, put quite literally in the first scene of the film. Gerwig challenges this as she takes a different approach from the book's original ending, hinting at the possibility that Jo March might remain unmarried after all. The warm colour-grading of the scenes where she chased after Friedrich Bauer and when the sisters celebrated Marmee's brithday at Jo's new school points to the possibility that these two scenes are fictional and part of the book Jo is seen writing. Hence, the childhood flashbacks we've seen are all part of Jo's reminiscence. The colour grading makes it clear to us which scenes belong to which timeline, and also is a genius way to portray Jo's joyous recollection of her childhood memories in contrast to the cooler and grittier tone of the reality timeline.
Gerwig blurred the lines between fiction and reality by having Jo write the book with the happy ending we all know but also showing in the final scene through the reality timeline that Jo did achieve her most ambitious dream of publishing a book. She did not just married a man and give up on her writing. This ending respects the original Little Women story yet is Gerwig tipping her hat off to the author Louisa May Alcott whose life mirrored Jo's.
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