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Robyn Sassen
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FILM REVIEW: LITTLE WOMEN

I’VE got all my sisters with me: (from top) Jo March (Saoirse Ronan), Meg March (Emma Watson), Beth March (Eliza Scanlen) and Amy March (Florence Pugh). Photograph courtesy IMDb.

WE LIVE IN a world which is characterised by a lack of credibility and stability. Fake news has taken over the media industry like a cancer, spouting disbelief in every crevice. Violence of both a literal and a figurative nature is perpetrated wherever we look. All of this contributes meaningfully to the value of putting one’s creative heft behind honouring a classic as beautiful as Louisa May Alcott’s 19th century autobiographical novel, Little Women.

This film is virtually flawless in its sense of contextual integrity and in the way in which the four March girls, Meg (Emma Watson), Jo (Saoirse Ronan), Amy (Florence Pugh) and Beth (Eliza Scanlen) are brought to credible, lovely, three-dimensional life. Timothée Chalamet shines as Laurie, the boy next door who doesn’t trust his heart and opts ultimately for second best, and the broad lines of the tale are developed with clarity. Easily, this film redeems both Ronan and Chalamet from their performances in previous films which did not see them sufficiently pushed for greatness or subtlety.

It’s a tale with a trajectory that winds backwards and forwards in time; its leaps in chronology are not always, however, completely clear. When you’re dealing with a very little woman who is actually but a child, and one who is more of a young woman, disparity is evoked, forcing the audience to have to do a bit of work to examine context in order to sort the sequence of events into chronology.

While by and large the work is beautifully cast, is it the four sisters’ mum, “Marmee” (Laura Dern), who feels like a bit of anachronism. She seems both too stylish and too remote for the virtuous hard-working, poverty-stricken woman that she represents, and something stilted crops up in much of her engagement with the girls. Her much older sister-in-law, Aunt March is, however, handled with deliciousness by Meryl Streep. While this role is almost a vignette, it alone is sufficient reason to see this film.

Having said this, the rambunctious give and take between four loving siblings of the same gender is beautifully captured and upheld. It is here where sibling love is reflected as a complicated thing which can include spite and favouritism, malice and forgiveness, all in one breathless sequence.

Whether you have read this great period classic or not is almost irrelevant. This is a gorgeous understanding of sibling love and loss; of dreams actualised and averted; and of the magic of the book publishing era in 19th century America as well as the conflicts faced by women, then. It’s a triumph of a film that will give you a bubble of unmitigated beauty to avert your gaze from the ugliness of contemporary brokenness, albeit briefly.

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