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So I have now seen Gerwig's Little Women...
...and never let it be said that I can't admit when I'm wrong.
Some background for the new people: the 1994 version of Little Women is one of my all-time favorite movies. Like, seen it so many times I can quote the whole thing, watch it whenever I'm with my mom and sister, would play the score at my wedding were I ever to get married, that level of love. I think it is truly a perfect movie except for the casting of adult!Amy. I am very devoted to this film, okay?
So when I saw that there was going to be a remake, I was annoyed. Mostly because WHY? but also because I didn't think any director who would cast Emma Watson could possibly make a good version of Little Women. I decided I just wasn't going to see it and was going to pretend it didn't exist.
But then...people whose taste I trust started seeing it. And liking it. A lot. Enough that I realized I needed to at least give it a chance.
So it finally came to the uni cinema and I saw it tonight in a sold-out theater. And I loved it. It wasn't flawless, and I didn't love it in a replace-1994-way, but in a I'm-glad-this-one-exists too way. I really did not think that there was anything new that could be said through this story. It's been remade so many times (and so well the last time) that I felt that a remake was in the vein of many other remakes that have no purpose for existing and say absolutely nothing new. I was wrong. This version was true to the events of the book, the spirit of the girls, and yet it managed to feel like its own piece of art. I'm really impressed.
+ So first of all, I thought the flashbacks format really, really worked. In my favorite review of the 1994 version, Roger Ebert said that it's a story about how "all of life seems to stretch ahead of us when we're young, and how, through a series of choices, we choose and narrow our destiny." It is. And the flashback format worked for that. A big part of Jo's arc in any iteration is that she resents (and fears) the fact that she has to grow up. She longs for the freedom and family togetherness of childhood. This movie totally understood that and also understood how that longing for childhood freedom is really a longing for freedom of a kind that women at that time were denied. Jo doesn't really want to stay a child. She just doesn't want to be the kind of adult the world tells her she has to be. So moving backwards and forwards in time, showing the intense power of her memories, showing what she's lost--that works.
+ Well, it worked for me, because I know this story backwards and forwards. I know all the characters and all the plot twists and all the beats. It apparently did not work for the two old ladies beside me who afterwards talked about how confused they were the entire time. I don't think this is because they're dumb or bad movie watchers. I think that Gerwig was having a dialogue with a story she knows backwards and forwards for the benefit of all the girls and women (mostly but definitely not exclusively American) who have always had this story at the center of their own relationship with their girlhood. So I can see how that would just not work for someone who's unfamiliar (or even just a little familiar) with the story.
+ I don't really understand direction much besides, like, where the camera is placed (I do recognize different kinds of shots and such), so I can't say really what Gerwig brought to it in that capacity, but I liked where she placed the camera!
+ Saoirse Ronan, like Winona Ryder, is totally physically wrong for the part of Jo. Jo is big and awkward and very plain. She is not petite and beautiful. But just like Ryder did in 1994, Ronan did an amazing job of overcoming that and physically inhabiting Jo. The unrestrained body language is at the heart of it, but there's more to it than that. Ronan is one of the great actors of her generation anyway, so I knew she'd do a good job, but it was still gratifying to see. Though one day I hope we do see a version that actually casts a less feminine, less pretty, less dainty actress as Jo.
+ Florence Pugh was fantastic. Also physically wrong for Amy (I am annoyed they didn't curl her hair!!!), but again, she's such a strong actress that I was delighted with her performance. And the script does right by Amy! I have always loved Amy, but I think most of the people who have adapted the book in the past identify so much with Jo that they sell Amy short, and it was so nice to see a script that actually understands her and loves her. And understands the conflict between her and Jo, the competition, but also the love.
+ Eliza Scanlan had a very nice presence as Beth. There's not a lot to say about Beth because she's really there for her sisters to love and lose, but I thought the film did as good a job as was possible with making her feel like an actual person. The little details of her relationship with Mr. Laurence were especially well done and haven't always made it into the adaptations, so I was glad of that.
+ Okay, now my major complaint about the film: I'm sorry, Emma Watson can't act. I hate saying negative things about women (unless they're doing something morally wrong), but I just find her the blandest, most uninteresting presence. She was not Meg to me at all. She doesn't seem older the Saoirse, she had no chemistry with James Norton, she did not add one single thing to that character, and it's such a disappointment because I know the right actress could have done great things with her. Meg and Beth are never going to get as much screentime or be as beloved as Jo (and as Amy when she's done right, as she is in this film), but she doesn't have to be as flat as this. I think of Trini Alvarado (which--what happened to her? Has she done anything film-wise since she was Meg?) and how good she was as Meg and I want to weep. WHAT A MISSED OPPORTUNITY. I don't understand what Gerwig and her casting director were thinking. Could they have been told by the company that they had to cast a name? Couldn't they have found one that wasn't a black hole on screen?
+ Laura Dern didn't quite replace Susan Sarandon in my heart as Marmee, but I did like her, I loved the physical resemblance between her and Saoirse and most of all I am SO GLAD they included the lines about her being angry almost every day of her life. That was not in the 1994 version, and to me that is the fundamental thing you have to know about Marmee. She is not naturally good; she works hard to be a good person.
+ Which is the point of the story!!!! Little Women is a moralizing book. It is. Most Victorian moralizing books are absolutely terrible, but Alcott was talented enough and had a sense of humor enough to be outright moralizing and still make you actually care about the story. This film doesn't go there as much as the book, and that's fine, but I was really pleased that those kinds of conversations about being the kind of person you need to be were kept. Like, Alcott was such a daughter of her father, and education reform (which was a moral and a physical thing as well as scholastic one) was at the center of her worldview. I always think of how the basic plot of her book Eight Cousins is: after Rose is orphaned, she's raised by her uncle who basically uses her to implement all his theories about child-rearing and it works! She's happy and healthy and moral! Because if people are treated well and given all that they need, they will flourish. Being good will make you happy. Becoming a good person is work and it's holistic and Alcott was so all about that.
+ Timothee Chandalier, as![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dollsome always calls him, was fine. I'm not crazy about him as an actor? I usually like twinks, but for whatever reason he doesn't do it for me. He's so slight, though, that I have a hard time taking him seriously as a man that very-much-a-woman Florence Pugh might fall in love with. He's not bad! I just think there was a perfect Laurie actor out there who wasn't cast.
+ I am not familiar with Louis Garrel but WOW YES GOOD CASTING. To be strictly accurate, he should have been older and fully bearded, but I'm glad he wasn't because I really, really liked this portrayal of Bhaer. Wow yes very swoony.
+ Other cast members: James Norton is always pretty. Chris Cooper was such random casting, but I'm always glad to see him. Meryl Streep didn't need to have that role, but she clearly had a blast, so good for her.
+ I did love that Gerwig actually tried to flesh out the Amy/Laurie romance. I still don't think there was quite enough fleshing out, but I think that about 99% of romances I see onscreen, and she's did a much better job than any other adaptation I've seen. I LOVE Amy's attitude that Laurie is so privileged and he should use that and instead he's totally wasting it, and how she has no time for that. (Very Alcott-ish.) I do wish we'd got to see a bit more of Laurie growing up and deciding to make something of himself, but there wasn't room for that, and what's there is good.
+ I loved the Jo and Laurie relationship in this depiction. How physical and sibling-like it was. Like, you could see why Laurie would fall in love and assume that something would happen with him and Jo, but you could also totally see that Jo never intended that at all. She loves him to pieces. But it's not romantic and it's not sexual and she can never give him what she wants.
Which brings me to...
+ JO IS ASEXUAL!!!!! I know most people are like, "Jo is a lesbian!" and that's a great headcanon to have! But I think the text leans waaaaay more towards her being ace and aromantic and I love it to itty bitty bits. (Also Alcott was probably ace too I'm just saying.)
+ I just...I have rarely felt so understood as I was watching this film. I've literally never seen a movie that understands single women this way. Jo doesn't want a romance! She definitely doesn't want to be married, which would be the end of all her freedom! (And she would be a truly terrible wife according to the standards of the day.) She doesn't want it! And yet she's so bombarded with the cultural narrative that she has to have that, that she can't ever be loved if she doesn't have it, that she will be alone and lonely all her life if she doesn't obey the cultural mandate to surrender her freedom and find a husband. And it makes so much sense that she would say, "I know I don't want that...but I'm lonely and I want to be loved." I feel like that is the soul's cry of every person who doesn't want to fit into the heteronormative prescribed cultural role but does want so very desperately to be loved, as well all do.
No, I don't need to get married. I don't need any kind of romantic partner. But oh, I need love and the security of love. And it's so scary living in a world that tells you you can never have that unless you give in and live out the role that society has told you you have to have. This movie, through Jo, understands that in a way I've never seen in a film before.
+ Related, I had worried the movie would be too heavy-handed in the rhetoric of its feminism, too 21st century. But it wasn't. The rants against sexism rose from who the characters are. I do feel that overall, the dialogue did feel a little too contemporary--I would have liked to have seen an attempt to make it less contemporary. But it wasn't any more so in the feminist parts than the other parts, so I won't complain.
+ I have deeply conflicted feelings about Jo writing that letter to Laurie. On the one hand: all her stuff with Marmie about wanting to be loved and being lonely is so so so relatable and realistic and moving. It makes sense that she would be so confused about what kind of life she can possibly have in the world that she decides that, screw it, she has to get married and if she does, she might as well be married to Laurie. I just think the film implied a little too much that she really truly was in love with him? Which I don't think she was? I just think it could have been slightly more clear that she was reaching out not really because she regretted turning him down but because she was so lonely and scared of her future.
+ So I loved that the film implied that she didn't really get married. I love that. It's so good. THANK YOU FILM!
+ THE ENDING WAS SO SNEAKY. I mean re: Bhaer and Jo's marital status. I think that it's pretty clear that Gerwig wants her to be single, but it's also so clear that she knows that audiences still want the heroine to be married (or dead), and so she found a perfect, perfect way to balance it. She doesn't contradict the book! But she gives those of us who want Jo to be single a way to see that she is. It's just so meta but it's just so wonderful and I am not doing justice to that decision but I thought it was genius.
+ And yet...why did it have to happen with a film where I was really feeling the pairing? I really liked Bhaer. A lot. I wanted to see so much more of him, though I thought that the amount of screentime he had was appropriate. But I heart him! And I do think he and Jo could be happy! Why couldn't this Heroine Ends Up Single have happened in one of the thousand million stories where I don't like the love interest? There are so many, many stories where I would rather the heroine ended up single than end up with a lackluster (or worse) dude.
+ (Anyway if anyone has written a long fic about Jo and Bhaer working together at their school and falling slowly in love, I WANT TO READ THAT FIC. Link me.)
+ And let's talk about ambition. Women have it. This movie gets that. All the stuff with the publisher could have been heavy-handed, but it wasn't because Saoirse plays it too well. I loved it all. The awkwardness at the beginning where she can't even admit it's her writing, the willingness to let it be edited to shreds for the sake of money. And later at the end when she has so much self-assurance and is willing to haggle but not willing to sacrifice her ownership of the book. And the way she reacts to Bhaer's criticism was super realistic. I like that in this film he doesn't tell her what to write--he tells her she's talented but he doesn't like what she's written. She figures out the story that's worthy of her talent by herself (with Beth's help). And the montage of her writing her story and then watching the physical book being made had me crying like a baby.
+ I did feel like the film failed Amy's ambitions a little? But that's a weakness in the book itself. Her "I want to be great or be nothing" was a WOW line. I would have liked to have seen her make a choice to seek out something she could be great at. But also: it was realistic.
+ THE SCHOOL. That's the kind of bohemian school that Bronson Alcott and all his friends dreamed and dreamed of but could never make a functioning reality. And yeah, it stretches credulity that the school could be that idyllic. But I don't care. Because it's a beautiful dream and I want it to be real and what's the point of stories if we can't sometimes see things that aren't real and have them be real for a few minutes? Like, of course this is the perfect ending: all the people in Jo's life that she loves all together working on something that makes the world more beautiful. YES. So what if they wouldn't have really been able to admit black children? They should have been able to, and I'm glad in the world of this film, they could.
+ I appreciated that the film at least attempted to address race. I thought it did a decent job. It's really hard to address race at all in a story where it isn't the focus, but I think this was okay. (I'm open to disagreement.)
+ How GREAT was it that the daughters were demanding the rest of the book? Of course a man would reject a story about girls' domestic lives outright. (Of course he's not a good husband.) And of course girls would see themselves in the story (as they did in real life) and want more. Of course.
+ Speaking of: A+++++ letting Amy be the one who's right about how writing makes things more important. Again: that whole conversation could have been heavy-handed, but I just loved it. Writing about women's lives is a way of shouting that women's lives are important, it's a way of taking up room in the world--demanding room in the world. It's important.
+ I love that, instead of delivering the familiar lines in a way that would have been self-conscious (because we've heard them so many times), Gerwig has all the girls talking over each other all the time, which is exactly what my sister and cousins and I are like together. The constant girly chatter felt absolutely right. There was a moment where they're just chattering away all in a big knot and the three men from next door are just looking at them, bewildered.
+ This story has always gotten that sisterhood is messy but also that the bedrock can't be shaken, and the movie does, too.
+ I can't believe I haven't gotten to this yet, but the cinematography was unbelievable. A++ New England gorgeousness.
+ The hair was so laughably not-historically-accurate that I have to roll my eyes. Couldn't they at least try?
+ I am always, always happy to see Orchard House, and the production design inside was lovely and warm and homey.
+ The score was fine, but 1994's is a glorious work of art, so it seemed lackluster in comparison.
+ I did think there were a few times where the transitions between scenes felt abrupt or the line delivery felt stilted, which is why I say this wasn't a perfect film. But it wasn't enough to affect my overall enjoyment of the film.
+ I cried the entire second half of the movie. And I hadn't brought any tissues, so I was wiping away tears with my hands the entire time. After it was over, the old lady next to me said, "Did you enjoy it? You were really weeping." YES I WAS. I'm probably going to have a headache tomorrow.
+ I am sure I will think later of things I want to say, but this is over 3k words now and I want to go to bed, so I'm stopping.
Some background for the new people: the 1994 version of Little Women is one of my all-time favorite movies. Like, seen it so many times I can quote the whole thing, watch it whenever I'm with my mom and sister, would play the score at my wedding were I ever to get married, that level of love. I think it is truly a perfect movie except for the casting of adult!Amy. I am very devoted to this film, okay?
So when I saw that there was going to be a remake, I was annoyed. Mostly because WHY? but also because I didn't think any director who would cast Emma Watson could possibly make a good version of Little Women. I decided I just wasn't going to see it and was going to pretend it didn't exist.
But then...people whose taste I trust started seeing it. And liking it. A lot. Enough that I realized I needed to at least give it a chance.
So it finally came to the uni cinema and I saw it tonight in a sold-out theater. And I loved it. It wasn't flawless, and I didn't love it in a replace-1994-way, but in a I'm-glad-this-one-exists too way. I really did not think that there was anything new that could be said through this story. It's been remade so many times (and so well the last time) that I felt that a remake was in the vein of many other remakes that have no purpose for existing and say absolutely nothing new. I was wrong. This version was true to the events of the book, the spirit of the girls, and yet it managed to feel like its own piece of art. I'm really impressed.
+ So first of all, I thought the flashbacks format really, really worked. In my favorite review of the 1994 version, Roger Ebert said that it's a story about how "all of life seems to stretch ahead of us when we're young, and how, through a series of choices, we choose and narrow our destiny." It is. And the flashback format worked for that. A big part of Jo's arc in any iteration is that she resents (and fears) the fact that she has to grow up. She longs for the freedom and family togetherness of childhood. This movie totally understood that and also understood how that longing for childhood freedom is really a longing for freedom of a kind that women at that time were denied. Jo doesn't really want to stay a child. She just doesn't want to be the kind of adult the world tells her she has to be. So moving backwards and forwards in time, showing the intense power of her memories, showing what she's lost--that works.
+ Well, it worked for me, because I know this story backwards and forwards. I know all the characters and all the plot twists and all the beats. It apparently did not work for the two old ladies beside me who afterwards talked about how confused they were the entire time. I don't think this is because they're dumb or bad movie watchers. I think that Gerwig was having a dialogue with a story she knows backwards and forwards for the benefit of all the girls and women (mostly but definitely not exclusively American) who have always had this story at the center of their own relationship with their girlhood. So I can see how that would just not work for someone who's unfamiliar (or even just a little familiar) with the story.
+ I don't really understand direction much besides, like, where the camera is placed (I do recognize different kinds of shots and such), so I can't say really what Gerwig brought to it in that capacity, but I liked where she placed the camera!
+ Saoirse Ronan, like Winona Ryder, is totally physically wrong for the part of Jo. Jo is big and awkward and very plain. She is not petite and beautiful. But just like Ryder did in 1994, Ronan did an amazing job of overcoming that and physically inhabiting Jo. The unrestrained body language is at the heart of it, but there's more to it than that. Ronan is one of the great actors of her generation anyway, so I knew she'd do a good job, but it was still gratifying to see. Though one day I hope we do see a version that actually casts a less feminine, less pretty, less dainty actress as Jo.
+ Florence Pugh was fantastic. Also physically wrong for Amy (I am annoyed they didn't curl her hair!!!), but again, she's such a strong actress that I was delighted with her performance. And the script does right by Amy! I have always loved Amy, but I think most of the people who have adapted the book in the past identify so much with Jo that they sell Amy short, and it was so nice to see a script that actually understands her and loves her. And understands the conflict between her and Jo, the competition, but also the love.
+ Eliza Scanlan had a very nice presence as Beth. There's not a lot to say about Beth because she's really there for her sisters to love and lose, but I thought the film did as good a job as was possible with making her feel like an actual person. The little details of her relationship with Mr. Laurence were especially well done and haven't always made it into the adaptations, so I was glad of that.
+ Okay, now my major complaint about the film: I'm sorry, Emma Watson can't act. I hate saying negative things about women (unless they're doing something morally wrong), but I just find her the blandest, most uninteresting presence. She was not Meg to me at all. She doesn't seem older the Saoirse, she had no chemistry with James Norton, she did not add one single thing to that character, and it's such a disappointment because I know the right actress could have done great things with her. Meg and Beth are never going to get as much screentime or be as beloved as Jo (and as Amy when she's done right, as she is in this film), but she doesn't have to be as flat as this. I think of Trini Alvarado (which--what happened to her? Has she done anything film-wise since she was Meg?) and how good she was as Meg and I want to weep. WHAT A MISSED OPPORTUNITY. I don't understand what Gerwig and her casting director were thinking. Could they have been told by the company that they had to cast a name? Couldn't they have found one that wasn't a black hole on screen?
+ Laura Dern didn't quite replace Susan Sarandon in my heart as Marmee, but I did like her, I loved the physical resemblance between her and Saoirse and most of all I am SO GLAD they included the lines about her being angry almost every day of her life. That was not in the 1994 version, and to me that is the fundamental thing you have to know about Marmee. She is not naturally good; she works hard to be a good person.
+ Which is the point of the story!!!! Little Women is a moralizing book. It is. Most Victorian moralizing books are absolutely terrible, but Alcott was talented enough and had a sense of humor enough to be outright moralizing and still make you actually care about the story. This film doesn't go there as much as the book, and that's fine, but I was really pleased that those kinds of conversations about being the kind of person you need to be were kept. Like, Alcott was such a daughter of her father, and education reform (which was a moral and a physical thing as well as scholastic one) was at the center of her worldview. I always think of how the basic plot of her book Eight Cousins is: after Rose is orphaned, she's raised by her uncle who basically uses her to implement all his theories about child-rearing and it works! She's happy and healthy and moral! Because if people are treated well and given all that they need, they will flourish. Being good will make you happy. Becoming a good person is work and it's holistic and Alcott was so all about that.
+ Timothee Chandalier, as
dollsome always calls him, was fine. I'm not crazy about him as an actor? I usually like twinks, but for whatever reason he doesn't do it for me. He's so slight, though, that I have a hard time taking him seriously as a man that very-much-a-woman Florence Pugh might fall in love with. He's not bad! I just think there was a perfect Laurie actor out there who wasn't cast.+ I am not familiar with Louis Garrel but WOW YES GOOD CASTING. To be strictly accurate, he should have been older and fully bearded, but I'm glad he wasn't because I really, really liked this portrayal of Bhaer. Wow yes very swoony.
+ Other cast members: James Norton is always pretty. Chris Cooper was such random casting, but I'm always glad to see him. Meryl Streep didn't need to have that role, but she clearly had a blast, so good for her.
+ I did love that Gerwig actually tried to flesh out the Amy/Laurie romance. I still don't think there was quite enough fleshing out, but I think that about 99% of romances I see onscreen, and she's did a much better job than any other adaptation I've seen. I LOVE Amy's attitude that Laurie is so privileged and he should use that and instead he's totally wasting it, and how she has no time for that. (Very Alcott-ish.) I do wish we'd got to see a bit more of Laurie growing up and deciding to make something of himself, but there wasn't room for that, and what's there is good.
+ I loved the Jo and Laurie relationship in this depiction. How physical and sibling-like it was. Like, you could see why Laurie would fall in love and assume that something would happen with him and Jo, but you could also totally see that Jo never intended that at all. She loves him to pieces. But it's not romantic and it's not sexual and she can never give him what she wants.
Which brings me to...
+ JO IS ASEXUAL!!!!! I know most people are like, "Jo is a lesbian!" and that's a great headcanon to have! But I think the text leans waaaaay more towards her being ace and aromantic and I love it to itty bitty bits. (Also Alcott was probably ace too I'm just saying.)
+ I just...I have rarely felt so understood as I was watching this film. I've literally never seen a movie that understands single women this way. Jo doesn't want a romance! She definitely doesn't want to be married, which would be the end of all her freedom! (And she would be a truly terrible wife according to the standards of the day.) She doesn't want it! And yet she's so bombarded with the cultural narrative that she has to have that, that she can't ever be loved if she doesn't have it, that she will be alone and lonely all her life if she doesn't obey the cultural mandate to surrender her freedom and find a husband. And it makes so much sense that she would say, "I know I don't want that...but I'm lonely and I want to be loved." I feel like that is the soul's cry of every person who doesn't want to fit into the heteronormative prescribed cultural role but does want so very desperately to be loved, as well all do.
No, I don't need to get married. I don't need any kind of romantic partner. But oh, I need love and the security of love. And it's so scary living in a world that tells you you can never have that unless you give in and live out the role that society has told you you have to have. This movie, through Jo, understands that in a way I've never seen in a film before.
+ Related, I had worried the movie would be too heavy-handed in the rhetoric of its feminism, too 21st century. But it wasn't. The rants against sexism rose from who the characters are. I do feel that overall, the dialogue did feel a little too contemporary--I would have liked to have seen an attempt to make it less contemporary. But it wasn't any more so in the feminist parts than the other parts, so I won't complain.
+ I have deeply conflicted feelings about Jo writing that letter to Laurie. On the one hand: all her stuff with Marmie about wanting to be loved and being lonely is so so so relatable and realistic and moving. It makes sense that she would be so confused about what kind of life she can possibly have in the world that she decides that, screw it, she has to get married and if she does, she might as well be married to Laurie. I just think the film implied a little too much that she really truly was in love with him? Which I don't think she was? I just think it could have been slightly more clear that she was reaching out not really because she regretted turning him down but because she was so lonely and scared of her future.
+ So I loved that the film implied that she didn't really get married. I love that. It's so good. THANK YOU FILM!
+ THE ENDING WAS SO SNEAKY. I mean re: Bhaer and Jo's marital status. I think that it's pretty clear that Gerwig wants her to be single, but it's also so clear that she knows that audiences still want the heroine to be married (or dead), and so she found a perfect, perfect way to balance it. She doesn't contradict the book! But she gives those of us who want Jo to be single a way to see that she is. It's just so meta but it's just so wonderful and I am not doing justice to that decision but I thought it was genius.
+ And yet...why did it have to happen with a film where I was really feeling the pairing? I really liked Bhaer. A lot. I wanted to see so much more of him, though I thought that the amount of screentime he had was appropriate. But I heart him! And I do think he and Jo could be happy! Why couldn't this Heroine Ends Up Single have happened in one of the thousand million stories where I don't like the love interest? There are so many, many stories where I would rather the heroine ended up single than end up with a lackluster (or worse) dude.
+ (Anyway if anyone has written a long fic about Jo and Bhaer working together at their school and falling slowly in love, I WANT TO READ THAT FIC. Link me.)
+ And let's talk about ambition. Women have it. This movie gets that. All the stuff with the publisher could have been heavy-handed, but it wasn't because Saoirse plays it too well. I loved it all. The awkwardness at the beginning where she can't even admit it's her writing, the willingness to let it be edited to shreds for the sake of money. And later at the end when she has so much self-assurance and is willing to haggle but not willing to sacrifice her ownership of the book. And the way she reacts to Bhaer's criticism was super realistic. I like that in this film he doesn't tell her what to write--he tells her she's talented but he doesn't like what she's written. She figures out the story that's worthy of her talent by herself (with Beth's help). And the montage of her writing her story and then watching the physical book being made had me crying like a baby.
+ I did feel like the film failed Amy's ambitions a little? But that's a weakness in the book itself. Her "I want to be great or be nothing" was a WOW line. I would have liked to have seen her make a choice to seek out something she could be great at. But also: it was realistic.
+ THE SCHOOL. That's the kind of bohemian school that Bronson Alcott and all his friends dreamed and dreamed of but could never make a functioning reality. And yeah, it stretches credulity that the school could be that idyllic. But I don't care. Because it's a beautiful dream and I want it to be real and what's the point of stories if we can't sometimes see things that aren't real and have them be real for a few minutes? Like, of course this is the perfect ending: all the people in Jo's life that she loves all together working on something that makes the world more beautiful. YES. So what if they wouldn't have really been able to admit black children? They should have been able to, and I'm glad in the world of this film, they could.
+ I appreciated that the film at least attempted to address race. I thought it did a decent job. It's really hard to address race at all in a story where it isn't the focus, but I think this was okay. (I'm open to disagreement.)
+ How GREAT was it that the daughters were demanding the rest of the book? Of course a man would reject a story about girls' domestic lives outright. (Of course he's not a good husband.) And of course girls would see themselves in the story (as they did in real life) and want more. Of course.
+ Speaking of: A+++++ letting Amy be the one who's right about how writing makes things more important. Again: that whole conversation could have been heavy-handed, but I just loved it. Writing about women's lives is a way of shouting that women's lives are important, it's a way of taking up room in the world--demanding room in the world. It's important.
+ I love that, instead of delivering the familiar lines in a way that would have been self-conscious (because we've heard them so many times), Gerwig has all the girls talking over each other all the time, which is exactly what my sister and cousins and I are like together. The constant girly chatter felt absolutely right. There was a moment where they're just chattering away all in a big knot and the three men from next door are just looking at them, bewildered.
+ This story has always gotten that sisterhood is messy but also that the bedrock can't be shaken, and the movie does, too.
+ I can't believe I haven't gotten to this yet, but the cinematography was unbelievable. A++ New England gorgeousness.
+ The hair was so laughably not-historically-accurate that I have to roll my eyes. Couldn't they at least try?
+ I am always, always happy to see Orchard House, and the production design inside was lovely and warm and homey.
+ The score was fine, but 1994's is a glorious work of art, so it seemed lackluster in comparison.
+ I did think there were a few times where the transitions between scenes felt abrupt or the line delivery felt stilted, which is why I say this wasn't a perfect film. But it wasn't enough to affect my overall enjoyment of the film.
+ I cried the entire second half of the movie. And I hadn't brought any tissues, so I was wiping away tears with my hands the entire time. After it was over, the old lady next to me said, "Did you enjoy it? You were really weeping." YES I WAS. I'm probably going to have a headache tomorrow.
+ I am sure I will think later of things I want to say, but this is over 3k words now and I want to go to bed, so I'm stopping.