Gerwig is clearly aware of and anxious about the intersectional challenges presented by her source material. It has the same attitude toward the past that is at the core of the American Girl business: history is not a nightmare to wake up from it’s a beautiful wonderland where there is always some girl whose life circumstances allow her to have a jolly and guilt-free time.
MOVIE LITTLE WOMEN MOVIE
Perhaps this fact has less to do with the gender of the creative talent than with the fact that Little Women is the whitest movie I’ve seen since The Swiss Family Robinson. As the writer Kristy Eldredge noted in a Times op-ed, Little Women has thus far garnered just “two Golden Globe nominations and zero Screen Actors Guild nods” (one for Best Actress, one for Best Original Score, nothing for Gerwig). The other complaint is that the movie has been overlooked during awards season. Little Women is about the resourcefulness, power, and imagination of women the notion that Gerwig’s movie needs male ticket buyers to affirm its quality is ridiculous. In the novel, her father calls her “my son Jo” she cuts her hair short her only romantic possibility is with someone named Laurie, who often addresses her as “my dear fellow” and she is completely uninterested in getting married to a man she does love, except … not in that way. I can’t have been the only kid who assumed she was a lesbian-or, as they were called in 1968, a tomboy. Fan-favorite Jo can do very well without men at all. The two principal men in the story, Laurie and his grandfather, are largely without purpose until their lives intersect with those of the girls. Marmee is the indestructible leader of the family, no matter what comes her way. He’s often absent, and when he appears he is usually ineffectual. As in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books-another world of women in which the household is more a unit of production than consumption- the much-adored father is a bit like Joseph in a Renaissance painting: a slumbering and irrelevant figure. Men might not feel great after seeing Little Women, because the movie, like the book, takes a dim view of them. If, as Christopher Lasch claimed, second-wave feminism represented the incursion of capitalist individualism into the life of the home, Little Women reveals that there was, and is, something powerful about domestic life, and that women (see the makeup of the audience) are particularly attracted to it. Jo is not up in the attic making a rocket ship that the stupid patriarchy will ignore. Their STEM dreams are not being thwarted. The heart of the movie, though, is the private lives of the March girls, who are making a home together and following their natural talents in writing and acting in plays and painting and taking care of small children. The movie has some explicitly feminist passages, dealing with the nature of marriage in the 19th century, and they are very good. It seems to me that the real feminist problem of this new Little Women is not that so many men don’t want to see the movie it’s that so many women do. The male gaze is back! Only now we want it. “ Little Women Has a Little Man Problem,” Vanity Fair “Men Are Dismissing ‘Little Women.’ What a Surprise,” The New York Times “Dear Men Who Are Afraid to See ‘Little Women’: You Can Do This,” The Washington Post. When a movie is this much of a triumph, there are bound to be complaints. The novel had an ending all of us hated, and she created one that changes everything. She understood that the wide familiarity with the story wasn’t a challenge but a fantastic opportunity. She recognized what few filmmakers do when they approach a widely known story: Fans won’t countenance cutting major episodes, but they will happily see the story expanded in new directions. Gerwig laid the story flat, cut it apart, and rearranged it she added new sections and then turned the whole thing into a paper lantern-beautiful, unexpected, and glowing. The thought of doing the stations of the cross one more time-the cutting of the hair the burning of the manuscript the catching of the scarlet fever-was out of the question.īut could that many critics be wrong? I bought a ticket to see the movie, settled down for a long winter’s nap-and from the opening scene was in its thrall. Movie versions have tended to be even worse. I loved the book as a child, but as an adult I’ve always found it cloying. How did Greta Gerwig get herself mixed up in this? I was at a movie theater, realizing that the trailer unspooling before me was for yet another adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. She is the author of Girl Land and To Hell With All That. About the author: Caitlin Flanagan is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
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