Let’s face it: remakes are often unnecessary at best and inferior at worst. That said, I don’t imagine most people consider Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women when contemplating the redundancy of reboots, despite it being adapted for film more times than, say, A Star Is Born (which has been rebooted so many times it should be retitled A Planetary Nebula). Unless you count Mariah Carey’s Glitter, which is ostensibly the Black and Gold knock-off of A Star Is Born – it’s been remade four times. By comparison there are five Little Women adaptations. The latest and in my humble opinion, the best of which was made by Greta Gerwig.
Little Women is a coming-of-age story about the March sisters, namely Jo, a tomboy and writer; Amy, an artist with a penchant for pretty things; Meg, the dutiful and protective eldest sister; and Beth, the sweet, albeit one-dimensional and doomed one. I love the original novel (or novels, if you consider it was originally published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869) with all my heart. You would think that my esteem for the original text would leave me leery of film adaptations but no. I’m especially fond of Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 version, starring Winona Ryder and a baby-faced Christian Bale, with it’s crackling yuletide logs and warm maternal embraces. (Being Australian, I don’t even know what a yuletide log is.)
But as much as I adore Armstrong’s version, it’s Gerwig’s remake that truly moves me. I applaud the casting of Saoirse Ronan as the indomitable Jo March, and respect the long-overdue redemption of Amy, played by Florence Pugh. Notable mention goes to Timothée Chalamet as Laurie, if for no reason other than his petite stature being grounds enough for a Little Men spin-off. Mostly I love Gerwig’s film because it allows us to see – inevitable spoiler alert − Jo come into her own in the final act.
Amid pressure from her publisher and readers, Alcott acquiesced to giving Jo a neat romantic ending with an older professor, Friedrich Bhaer. It’s arguably an unsatisfying conclusion because Jo nearly represented a consequence-free refutation of gendered strictures. She lived fearlessly, authentically and creatively. She was a guide for how to be a girl but not only a girl. Having her marry Bhaer sent a message: that our imaginative lives are auxiliary to our domestic duties, or at best a folly of childhood. Moreover it told us that settling down – or that settling, period – is not just necessary but inevitable.
Gerwig knew audiences haven’t felt an affinity with Jo’s fate for many years so she concludes her film with a meta-twist in which two endings play out in tandem. Jo writes an ending to her novel at the behest of her publisher in which her protagonist marries. We see Jo opening a school in cantankerous Aunt March’s mansion, surrounded by Bhaer and her sprawling family. But we also see Jo watching her novel being printed. Her burgeoning career, we are positioned to believe, is what is really real, or at least what really matters.
This new ending is a twist but not a twist of the knife. Indeed it’s deferential to Alcott, a nod to the end she wanted to write (she had wanted Jo to be a “literary spinster”, in her own words) but couldn’t because of the demands of the day. The kiss in the rain under Bhaer’s brolly might as well be off-camera. Instead, seeing Jo behold her very own book is the stuff of deep, abiding love.
So, in an age of endless reboots, Gerwig’s Little Women is not a derivative cash-grab. In allowing Jo’s star to be born (sorry not sorry) she has rediscovered the pulsing heartbeat of Little Women. Jo famously bemoans that she is “so sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for”. And she is right, in a sense. But also wrong, because love is all: not just romantic love but the love we feel for family, for strangers, for art, for creativity, for writing. And, thanks to Gerwig, Jo finally exists in a time when women can have all that.
