Pleasant and well done

I’ve never had a great urge to watch any adaptation of “Little Women” but I can say for sure i’ve waited til a good time in my life where I can at least respect it. Gillian Armstrong’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s book is quaint, pleasant, and simple in its love for the source material- never terribly exciting but that doesn’t discount verve.


The story focuses on the March sisters of Concorde, Massachusetts. Jo (Winona Ryder), Meg (Trini Alvarado), Beth (Claire Danes) and Amy (Kristen Dunst) live with their mother Marmee (Susan Sarandon), who tries to keep the lamp oil burning and everyone fed while her husband is away fighting in the Civil War.


The girls try to keep busy, staging theatrical plays in the attic and joshing around outside, all of which Marmee thinks is great because girls need to exert themselves just as much as boys. She is their biggest champion, wishing them chances to use their intellect, personality, and hearts in a world that is more often than not unjust to women.


The personalities of her daughters become a big part of the film’s first half. They are as tight knit and on the same wavelength as sisters can be, giggling over boys, performing these goofy plays and discussing hopes, dreams, and all manner of things. They often clash, or at the very least come off as troublesome, but family is of great importance to them, too.

Jo is playfully eccentric but has a serious desire to become a writer. Meg is the oldest and more mature, expected to marry soon for the good of the family. Amy is the youngest but harbors desires that are much older in nature. And Beth comes off as tragic right away as she’s the one who seems most likely to die first.


All of them are at an age where boys are becoming more of a curiosity and so when Laurie (Christian Bale) moves into his Uncle’s house next door, there is competition. “She’s bald in the front,” Jo says of Meg when Laurie confesses an interest in her first. No mention is made that Jo made her that way in an accidental incident beforehand.


Funny scenes like that one intermingle with stronger, more poignant stuff like Marmee consoling them when life doesn’t quite measure up or when a little nugget of truth needs to be dropped. The girls also do what they can for her, like in one scene where Jo sells most of her hair so that Marmee can get to her husband in hospital.


And Armstrong knows to make feminism an exciting concept and not a dirty word. Jo heading off to New York to achieve her writer’s destiny is an opportunity we can root for and as she learns to hold her own in conversation and meet the writing demands that scholar Friedrich Bhaer (Gabriel Byrne) knows she possesses, we never like her more than here.


Ryder leads the way in the cast, making Jo’s rise from girlhood to a woman of worth and purpose something special, and there is undeniable sweetness between her and Byrne, playing a transcendentalist who introduces her to the finer things, prods her to seek within herself for greatness, but also harbors affections.


Pretty much everyone is good here- from Sarandon spouting wisdom, to Alvarado being the most shy and modest of the girls, Dunst being the brattiest, and Danes getting a death scene of great and subtle impact. The chemistry they display as sisters makes so much of the movie work.


It also has to be mentioned how idyllic the whole movie looks. It’s like these people live in one of those wintery diorama village scenes you usually see in store windows at Christmas time.


If anything, maybe this movie is too sweet, filled with people who are as impeccable as the pristine place in which they live. They’re too nice and so is the world they inhabit but, still, the issues of women reconciling their dreams with society expectation and the unbreakable bond of sisterhood are handled seriously, and with undeniable affection.