Greta Gerwig’s Little Women Is Great; It’s Just Not Little Women

Before seeing Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, I knew I’d be in for a more avant-garde adaptation – in interviews, Gerwig has talked openly about wanting to “strip away” the story’s “pre-Victorian morality,” unearthing a “radical” story about “ambitious, passionate, angry, sexual, interesting women who don’t fit into the boxes the world has given them.” What I got was, in many respects, a movie that could not be more different from Armstrong’s 1994 version. Certainly, whereas Armstrong’s Little Women is soft, gentle, luminous, spiritual, and transcendent, like an impressionistic painting, Gerwig’s is far more Dickensian, exhuming a bolder, louder, faster, rougher, grittier, and altogether more agnostic world. And whereas Armstrong’s Little Women is like a river, fluid and flowing, Gerwig’s is like a stormy sea, unfolding as a sequence of flurrying, flustering flashbacks. In employing such a formula, Gerwig dwindles Alcott’s most iconic moments into faraway reminiscences that feel detached, uprooted, and altogether decontextualized – like mere boxes to be checked, as opposed to the emotionally powerful and contextually necessary parts of the story that they are.

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Last September, Sony Pictures CEO Tony Vinciquerra intimated to Variety that his studio hopes to remake The Princess Bride, informing the magazine that “very famous people” regularly come to him with ideas for a redo of the 1987 cult classic. Within a matter of hours, Vinciquerra’s admission had ignited a Twitter storm of widespread, inexorable fury: “There is a shortage of perfect movies in this world. It would be a pity to damage this one,” tweeted Cary Elwes, who starred in the original film alongside Robin Wright, Chris Sarandon, and Christopher Guest, while actress (and Guest’s wife) Jamie Lee Curtis authoritatively declared that “there is only ONE The Princess Bride and it’s William Goldman and Rob Reiner’s.” Even one-time presidential hopeful Ted Cruz was sure to make his opinions known: “NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!,” he expressively tweeted, calling the movie “the greatest thing in the world” and beseeching Sony to not “MESS WITH PERFECTION.”

While this indignation might seem surprising or even ridiculous to some, it has become something of a normative standard in today’s world of cinematic recycling. People seem to hate remakes for every reason imaginable, lambasting them all as notionally redundant, shamelessly acquisitive cash cows that serve only to jumble what is an already too-crowded box office and cheat us out of our hard-earned money. Consider, for example, the critical response to two Disney remakes from this past summer: Indiewire’s David Ehrlich spared no feelings when slashing Jon Favreau’s The Lion King as “a self-portrait of a movie studio eating its own tail,” while The Wrap’s William Bibbiani slammed Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin as a “chintzy revival, specifically designed to appeal to audiences who think ‘that looks familiar’ qualifies as entertainment.”

In the past, I have always been somewhat bewildered by this hostility toward remakes. As a humble moviegoer, I have always been a firm believer in adaptation, crediting it as a fundamental and imperative pillar of artistic creation. If able to balance emulation with reinvention and modernization, a remake can breathe new life into an antiquated or overlooked original, resurrecting it from oblivion or smoothing out some jagged, culturally discordant edges. I saw this summer’s The Lion King and Aladdin, and you know what? I loved them. Every second of them. Both movies were at once unapologetically “familiar” and wildly entertaining, each adding new depth and excitement to the beloved stories with fresh casts, new songs, and twenty-first-century technical bravura. While their atavism may have rendered them “creatively bankrupt” in critics’ eyes, to me, they were reminiscent of a less complicated and more wholesome yesteryear. They took me back to my childhood, and for that, I am grateful.

There is something about Greta Gerwig’s new Little Women, however, that has and continues to feel weirdly exemptive for me. Even after my viewing of the film, I remain fiercely beholden to Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s seminal tale of the four March sisters, written by Robin Swicord and starring Winona Ryder as Jo, Trini Alvarado as Meg, Claire Danes as Beth, Kirsten Dunst/Samantha Mathis as Amy, Susan Sarandon as the girls’ mother, “Marmee,” and Christian Bale as their next-door neighbor, Laurie. In an age inundated by Disney princesses, all following highly conventional motifs of the “happy ending” or the “damsel in distress,” Armstrong’s Little Women helped to reframe my conception of my own self-worth and potential, celebrating a femininity rooted in not only romance and marriage, but also intellect, friendship, independence, and courage. To this day, it remains a sacred memento of my childhood and a deep emotional anchor, ever tying me to all that it means to be a smart, kind, and confident “little woman.” Truth be told, I cannot even write this reflection of how much the film means to me without crying.

Indeed, as hard as I try to be receptive to Gerwig’s new film (and no matter how many times I remind myself of the imperatives of adaptation), I find myself wondering whether there are some movies, like Armstrong’s, that are just so beloved, and so sacrosanct, that they deserve to be preserved as they are, encased in a capsule of unreproducible, alchemistic perfection, free from the tides of change and “modernization.”

Truly, Armstrong’s “Little Women” is just that perfect. When it premiered twenty-five years ago, The New York Times hailed it as the “loveliest ‘Little Women’ ever on screen” – a veritable “gold standard for girlhood across America” – while The Chicago Tribune called it “at once contemporary … and authentically antique,” a real, livable glimpse into the lives of the little women who have come before us.1 With dexterity and discernment, the film is somehow able to couple Alcott’s signature sweetness and sentimentality with a rich historical backdrop, giving the movie an intellectual as well as emotional fiber. “Armstrong finds the serious themes,” wrote Roger Ebert in 1994, “and refuses to simplify the story into a ‘family’ formula.” Certainly, while Hollywood’s four previous adaptations of Little Women followed a rather predictable and saccharine script, Armstrong’s version bravely situates Victorian America’s beau ideal of the “separate spheres” as the film’s contextual centerpiece, depicting how the March sisters endeavor to find purpose and identity outside the domestic realm while disproving assumptions regarding their so-called “weaker” sex. At the heart of this feminist sensibility is Ryder’s Jo – the “wild girl,” eternally guided by her “love of liberty and hate of conventionalities”; the “bookworm” who runs wild, scorns romance, and aims to do “something heroic, or wonderful,” and altogether unmatrimonial.

As the movie transports the viewer to 1860s New England, a world in which it was improper to shake hands, run through the streets, drink alcohol, or use words like “blast” and “wretch,” it also pays masterful homage to transcendentalism, the German-inspired romantic philosophy prioritizing spiritual intuition above empirical experience, which gained traction in mid-nineteenth-century Concord in large part thanks to Alcott’s own father, Amos Bronson Alcott. Naturally, the philosophy finds its way onto Alcott’s pages as an intellectual subject, a literary motif, and a moral lesson, all wrapped in one: “Jo knew nothing about philosophy or metaphysics of any sort,” Alcott writes, situating Jo and the German-born Professor Bhaer in an “intellectual tournament” of Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel, “[but] she listened with a sense of being turned adrift into time and space, like a young balloon out on a holiday.” With intellectual depth and spiritual deference, Armstrong’s 1994 film honors this transcendentalist tradition with its subtle allusions to Walden Pond and Mr. March’s “new philosophies” – as well as Jo and Bhaer’s charming meet-cute, in which the couple bond over “throw[ing] off all our constraints” and “know[ing] ourselves through insight and experience.”

In the end, what Armstrong achieves is a transcendental experience in and of itself. Her Little Women is indeed less a movie and more an actual, living, breathing experience. With its cinematographic naturalness and a musical score that “[makes] you weep with nostalgia,”2 the film not only sets but puts one on the stage of the March girls’ lives, permitting us viewers to feel the warmth of a Christmas fire, the icy water beneath a frozen pond, the delicacy of a long-abandoned piano key, or a cool creek serenely rippling in and out of our bare toes. It’s as if, through our own transcendence, we can experience the thrills of playing Lady Zara or Sir Hugo, the joys of falling in love, the connective power of sisterhood, the miracle of a second chance, and the unconquerable pain of saying a final goodbye.

What results is not just the “loveliest ‘Little Women’ ever on screen,” but a reconversion, a spiritual baptism, whose watching makes one feel like the fifth March sister and, for me, a more courageous, more enlightened, and more selfless version of oneself. Surely, as Armstrong’s version transcends the barriers between time and space, closing the ever-widening gap between the March family’s world and our own, it underscores and proves the lasting, immortal power of self-transcendence – of putting the love we have for others before the love we have for ourselves; of building up the “kindness” and the “moral courage” to do what is right even when it is inconvenient, difficult, or even harmful to ourselves. In this vein, it is Beth, as well as Jo, who emerges as Armstrong’s moral and emotional nucleus. Whereas Jo is “wild” and “restless” and “anxious,” always “wanting to be somewhere else,” Beth is the family’s “Little Tranquility” who “seems to live in a happy world of her own”; she lives “for others so cheerfully” and never thinks of herself. In Alcott’s book, as well as in Armstrong’s movie, no moment passes without paying heed to the centrality of Jo and Beth’s grounding and instructive bond – Jo is Beth’s strength, and Beth is Jo’s conscience. Together, they constitute a yin and a yang, each personifying, in their own ways, the conflicting desires and expectations that tug on the human soul and the ingredients of a well-lived life.

Before seeing Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, I knew I’d be in for a more avant-garde adaptation – in interviews, Gerwig has talked openly about wanting to “strip away” the story’s “pre-Victorian morality,” unearthing a “radical” story about “ambitious, passionate, angry, sexual, interesting women who don’t fit into the boxes the world has given them.” What I got was, in many respects, a movie that could not be more different from Armstrong’s 1994 version. Certainly, whereas Armstrong’s Little Women is soft, gentle, luminous, spiritual, and transcendent, like an impressionistic painting, Gerwig’s is far more Dickensian, exhuming a bolder, louder, faster, rougher, grittier, and altogether more agnostic world. And whereas Armstrong’s Little Women is like a river, fluid and flowing, Gerwig’s is like a stormy sea, unfolding as a sequence of flurrying, flustering flashbacks. In employing such a formula, Gerwig dwindles Alcott’s most iconic moments into faraway reminiscences that feel detached, uprooted, and altogether decontextualized – like mere boxes to be checked, as opposed to the emotionally powerful and contextually necessary parts of the story that they are.

There was, of course, so much that I loved about Gerwig’s adaptation – her mastery of color and composition; her intrepid exploration of the antithetical tensions posed by nineteenth-century “love” and nineteenth-century “marriage”; and the depth, dimensionality, and overall believability she lends to many of the book’s relationships, especially those between Meg and John Brooke, played by Emma Watson and James Norton, and Amy and Laurie, played by Florence Pugh and Timothée Chalamet.

Chalamet seems to have been born to play Laurie, delivering a performance that feels far less roguish and sinister than Bale’s. Pugh’s Amy, meanwhile, is downright lovable, if however unfamiliar. Alcott’s Amy, to be sure, is not as blithe and compassionate – she is known for her “superior air” and “conceited” nature and long prioritizes “money, position, fashionable accomplishments, and elegant manners” over family (in the book, she does know that Beth is sick but decides to stay in Europe, for she knows she “shall never have another chance like this,” a detail that Gerwig interestingly refigures). Likewise, while brilliant and captivating, Saoirse Ronan’s Jo feels so different from the Jo we know and love – in contrast to Ronan’s Jo, Alcott’s Jo never writes Laurie a penitential letter to re-secure his offer of marriage, nor does she ever meanly vilify the sweet and supportive Professor Bhaer, labeling him a “pompous blowhard” that the world will never remember. Alcott’s Jo, to be sure, is temperamental and spunky. But she is never mean.

Ironically, it is Jo’s unkindness to Professor Bhaer in Gerwig’s adaptation that makes her attachment to him feel the most forced, uncomfortable, and transactional of all. In Armstrong’s version, there’s a well-developed sweetness and vulnerability to Jo’s relationship with the professor; as in the book, their love is deep and believable and good. In Gerwig’s, the two characters barely talk, Bhaer is creepy, and their “happily ever after” is left as a big question mark. While Jo and Bhaer technically share a kiss in Gerwig’s version, their undeveloped and unfamiliarly hostile relationship makes their romantic denouement seem more like a comically hurried wrap-up or a satirical caricature of the notorious “airport” trope, thereby cheapening what is read as a beautiful and positive thing into a tragic, uncharacteristic capitulation. At the movie’s end, Gerwig adds to this textual deviation by curating a conversation between Jo and her editor, in which Ronan’s Jo equates matrimony to some sort of enslavement or prostitution: “If I’m going to sell my heroine into marriage for money,” she negotiates, “I might as well get some of it.” In doing so, Gerwig’s version effectively suggests that Jo has not married the professor – or that, at the very least, we should not want her to.

Ultimately, by indulging in two, equally plausible endings, Gerwig leaves us questioning whether Jo has chosen Bhaer, a decision that feels like a precipitous, lustful, or concessive impulse – or whether she has ended up, much like Alcott, as a “literary spinster,” gleefully unmarried and professionally successful. Either way, I left the movie feeling uncomfortably suspended between the real and imaginary, unsure as to whether I had just seen an adaption of Little Women … or something else entirely.

Last December, Gerwig told Time, “I think you have license with material that is beloved, because you can start with a common language.”

I would argue, however, that with material that is so beloved, one has less a license to reinvent and radicalize and more a responsibility to honor and preserve. So much of Gerwig’s Little Women feels so thematically different, so emotionally unfamiliar, and so contextually out of place. Too often, the characters feel completely disassociated from the world in which they live and the brilliant mind that imagined them into literary existence – so much so that the tale of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy feels like a brand-new story.

But perhaps, in a way, that was exactly what Gerwig wanted. This total reinvention is imaginative and fun, of course. But it also feels strangely exploitative and deceptive. It’s as if Gerwig wanted to harness the textual richness and sentimental familiarity of Alcott’s genius without fully telling Alcott’s story – as if she wanted to have her cake and eat it too.

As I said, this is a lot of fun and makes for a great movie. It’s just not Little Women.

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All images are stills from the film courtesy of Sony Pictures.