She’s almost an anti-Amy, and I think Gerwig may have wanted her that way, as the speech to Laurie suggests.
#Little women laurie movie#
The fans of the movie are slobbering over her, and I like her, too, but she’s not Alcott’s Amy. Then, a more amazing thing: Amy, the youngest of the March girls, who in the novel is a very girly girl, a fan of ribbons and fripperies, is played by Florence Pugh, an Englishwoman with a voice like Marlene Dietrich. If Watson wasn’t perfect, that may have been the best that anyone could do in the allotted time, and, though she wasn’t Meg, it was still nice to see her again.) (It should be added that Meg was to have been played by Emma Stone, who was forced to pull out by competing obligations. In Gerwig’s movie, she is played by Emma Watson, the Hermione of the Harry Potter movies, and Watson is true to the form in which we knew her there: spunky and wild, that is, completely wrong as Meg. In the novel, Meg, the eldest, is a mild, maternal character. She did the same with the other girls, or she tried to. It is no surprise that she hired Saoirse Ronan to play Jo, the tomboy, with the flashing eyes and the no-nonsense talk. She certainly does this with the casting. In many other respects, Gerwig favors tough women. She’s always known, she says, that she would marry rich: In the film, soon after Jo’s speech, her sister Amy gives an even more forceful speech, to Laurie.
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But that’s not what Gerwig wanted her to have, so Gerwig fixed them. In other words, Alcott had mixed feelings. Jo gives a ringing speech about how tired she is of women being viewed as fit only for love, never for their minds or their talents. Byatt, Margaret Atwood-have testified that Alcott was an inspiration to them. A long line of female writers-Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Cynthia Ozick, Susan Sontag, A. The book was published in the mid-nineteenth century (1868-1869), and Alcott was clearly pressing against women’s chains, as readers have realized for many years. When they open a school, it is a boys’ school.īut no one who has read the whole of Alcott’s “Little Women” would say that these apparent backslidings toward a more conventional view of her sex unambivalently reflect her feelings. When they have children, they have two boys. Jo marries Bhaer, the man who told her to stop writing trash. (The book was published in two parts.) Only once that first volume was a success, and Alcott started receiving huge bags of letters asking whether Jo married her rich, handsome neighbor, Laurie, who is madly in love with her, did Alcott send Jo down the aisle, but not with Laurie.
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Alcott answered her publisher’s requests for a proper, marital ending by having Meg, Jo’s sister, married off, at the conclusion of the first volume. Elsewhere, when Friedrich Bhaer, a kind, penniless, and rather rumpled professor from Germany, criticizes the stories that Jo is writing for the local newspaper-saying, basically, “Why are you writing this inconsequential stuff? You could do so much better”-she goes off quietly to her room and burns the manuscripts.
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At one point, Marmee, the mother of the “little women”-the March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy-says that the best thing in the world a woman can have is the love of a good man.
#Little women laurie free#
Alcott, if we read her book carefully, wasn’t altogether sure that she wanted to make it a feminist rallying cry, and there are things in the book that make you think she would have given it all up-the writing, the independence, the choice not to marry (she never did: “I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe,” she wrote)-if the right man had come along. Furthermore, this one is unashamedly the modern version. It’s as if someone made a movie of the Book of Job. Gerwig’s “Little Women” is less a movie than an avatar, the rebirth of a beloved cultural property. It was a marvellous year for Best Pictures-indeed, best almost everythings. in Hollywood” and, above all, Bong Joon-ho’s “ Parasite,” are more interesting movies, but this is a high bar.
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If you ask other people, including me, Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time . . . Will Greta Gerwig’s beautiful “Little Women,” adapted from Louisa May Alcott’s novel, get the Oscar for Best Picture? A lot of moviegoers hope that it will-actually, insist that it should.