Louisa May Alcott, Robin Swicord, and Gillian Armstrong, 1994

I watched this movie in an actual movie theater shortly after it came out, because it had good reviews and in 1994 I tried to check out as many highly rated movies as I could in the theaters, since the alternative was VHS.  But I remembered the movie itself less than the chatter among the audience, because I went to a daytime show that was full of little girls whose moms had hoped to elevate the quality of their daughters’ media intake.  Mention Little Women to me and the first thing that’ll spring to mind is this exchange I overheard in the row behind me as the film was about to start:

Girl: “What’s this movie about?”

Mom: “It’s about four sisters.”

Girl: “Do any of them get kidnapped?”

Mom: “No! Of course not.”

Girl: “Then it isn’t going to be very exciting!”

So I started the 2019 version, but I was so distracted trying to compare it to the 1994 version I only dimly recalled that after a few minutes I thought I had better just rewatch the older film.  Verdict: no one gets kidnapped, so it isn’t very exciting!  Har har har.  Nah, my main criticism is simply that the actors can’t pull off the genteel nineteenth-century dialogue⁠—when they cry “Blast!” upon encountering misfortune or pepper their speech with indefinite personal pronouns (“One does have a choice in whom one loves”), it never sounds remotely natural.  They might as well be reciting Shakespeare, badly.  By contrast…

#7, 2019 Skandies

…the 2019 actors do make the dialogue sound less stilted; here the problem is that the filmmak­ers have cast an Irishwo­man, a couple of Brits, and an Austral­ian as the March sisters, and their American accents slip a lot.  But the performances aren’t really the issue with the 2019 movie.  A lot of filmmakers these days seem to be allergic to chronological storytelling⁠—e.g., the novel Cloud Atlas is built around the chronological jumps between its eleven sections, while the cinematic adaptation tries to tell all the novel’s con­stituent stories simultaneously and consquently ends up as a mess.  The novel Little Women only has one big jump, between the sisters’ adolescence and adulthood.  This means that if you’re going to use the same actress for a given sister, you have to cast…

…someone who can play the eldest sister, Meg, both as a sixteen-year-old at a debutante ball and as a mom with school-aged children;

…someone who can play the main character, Jo, both as a fifteen-year-old tomboy and as a young career woman in New York City;

…someone who can play the quiet sister, Beth, both as a sickly thirteen-year-old and as a dying woman in her early twenties;

…and someone who can play the baby of the family, Amy, both as a twelve-year-old girl and as a college-aged art student.

For Meg and Jo, this is probably doable.  As Meg, the 1994 film casts 27-year-old Trini Alvarado, and the 2019 film casts 28-year-old Emma Watson… but most of us are accustomed to watching high schoolers get played by actors in their twenties, even their late twenties, so fine.  They’re more convincing than Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker, at least.  As Jo, the 1994 film casts 22-year-old Winona Ryder, and the 2019 film casts 24-year-old Saoirse Ronan, and again, both had recently played high school students so it wasn’t too strange to see them still presented as members of that age bracket.  Beth… well, she doesn’t really have to age visibly, since she’s a frail waif in both time frames.  The 1994 film casts fifteen-year-old Claire Danes, and the 2019 film casts nineteen-year-old Eliza Scanlen.  Fine.

And then there’s Amy.  The 1994 filmmakers recognized that using the same actress for both time frames was never going to work.  Amy is a preteen in the first half of the book.  The 1994 film thus casts twelve-year-old Kirsten Dunst in the role.  She can’t pull off the lines, but she looks the part.  For the second half of the story, the 1994 film casts 24-year-old Samantha Mathis, with hair and dress making it clear that, yes, this is the same Amy, just twice as old.  But the 2019 movie skips back and forth and back and forth between the Lincoln and Grant administrations, and the filmmakers apparently thought it would be too confusing to introduce two different actresses playing Amy in alternating scenes.  And so 22-year-old Florence Pugh plays Amy at both ages.  And it doesn’t work at all.  22-year-old Holliday Grainger kind of pulled off playing twelve-year-old Lucrezia Borgia in the Showtime series, but Florence Pugh has a deep voice and a deep frown and could play forty a lot better than she can play twelve.  In the Civil War-era segments they try to give her a childlike haircut to try to feint in the direction that she’s prepubescent, but it’s ridiculous.  And yet somehow she won the Skandie for best supporting actress?  I mean, it’s not her fault that she’s a grown woman and therefore unbelievable as a twelve-year-old, but… dudes, you thought she was believable as a twelve-year-old?  Whut?  You might as well cast Kirsten Dunst as the younger Amy now.

Another thing I don’t like about the scrambled chronology of the 2019 film is that it feels as though it locks down the future.  Of course, the future is locked down in the novel and the 1994 film as well: turn to the last few chapters or click ahead to the last few scenes and you’ll only find one set of events.  But, at least to me, when a story is told in sequential order it feels as though there’s an infinite vista of possibility⁠—so many different ways any given character’s story could unfold.  Even if the story is told in the past tense, and set decades or centuries ago, the page you’re on is now, the pages ahead the unwritten future.  And that infinite vista of possibility is appropriate for a story about youth, when you can still become anything, before you have to start making irrevocable decisions about which paths to pursue and which possibilities to leave forever unexplored.  On the flip side, when you’re hopscotching around the timeline, the “now” must be after every event in that timeline has been set in stone⁠—and traversing such a story amounts to looking at a statue from dif­ferent angles rather than at a living, growing creature.  There’s no sense of “This child could be anything!” when we’ve already seen what she grows up to be.  And perhaps this is appropriate for a story about the infuriating strictures on what society per­mitted women to become in Alcott’s time.  But I found that the non-linear plotting sucked a lot of the life out of the proceedings.

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