LITTLE WOMEN (2019) – Review by MaryAnn Johanson

Did we need yet another film version of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel Little Women, which has been adapted for the big screen and for TV at least 20 times, first as a 1917 silent, most recently just last year (though in a very small indie production)? Turns out the answer is a resounding “Hell, yes!”

Writer-director Greta Gerwig has given us an absolute treasure of a movie, one that is, for a wonder, hugely faithful to the book in the broad sweep yet also skeptical of it in just the right way. Gerwig tells a tale we all know so well with a change of emphasis here, a small twist there, not merely for the sake of something new or to “update” it but to engage in a conversation with the book, teasing out why we continue to love it even with some rather regressive ideas running through it, liberal though the novel might have been in the 1860s. (If you aren’t familiar with the story, this is a superb introduction to it.) This is a 21st-century-feminist interrogation of the book that recognizes the cultural pressures that Alcott was under, as a woman and as a writer, even as she wrote about bucking expectations… and the pressures that Gerwig, as a filmmaker, and the girls and women in her modern audience are subject to as well. Continue reading…