The Red Pen: Little Women Edition

This essay discusses ending details and spoilers for Greta Gerwig’s 2019 Little Women. On the one hand, I’m a little late to this chat. On the other hand, time has lost all meaning.  

I have also run out of the energy to be polite. Maybe I’ll look back at this in 2022 and think I was too hard on Ms. Gerwig. Well, let it be.

This is an essay expanded from a Facebook thread that I began back in January, before everything shattered. Back then, I was working (sigh) out in Santa Monica (siigh) with South American students who were spending their summer exploring Los Angeles. I was delighted to show the Brazilian, Peruvian, and Argentinean youngsters around the city I love so much (siiigh). One afternoon, I chaperoned these kids on a trip to the movies.

The cinema had two screenings in the early afternoon: Star Wars: the Rise of Skywalker, directed by JJ Abrams, and Little Women, directed by Greta Gerwig. I had already seen both movies. The tipping point, as a chaperone, was that I had to maintain dignity. I feared I couldn’t keep my dignity up while watching Skywalker. (I mean, seriously! How do you bungle up the franchise so thoroughly? With all the money in the world, not to mention all the goodwill—nevermind, I’m getting off topic). I sat in on Little Women.

I was vexed the first time I watched Little Women: the second time, I walked in hoping that maybe I could better appreciate the whole, now that I knew the overall shape. Or maybe running after bored Brazilians and peripatetic Peruvians would have mellowed me out, hmm?

No such luck. I walked out twenty minutes before the movie ended.

Allow me to explain why.

With Little Women, Gerwig adapts the 1869 two-volume novel, written by Louisa May Alcott. It stars the four March sisters: Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. They dream, squabble, and generally come of age, trying hard to do their father proud as he serves the Union army during the Civil War. This story has been reprinted and adapted many times over the years.

I keep Alcott’s semi-autobiographical book on my list of Great American Novels for a reason. The way she writes about faith and purpose, and trying to live virtuously but that’s so damn hard—to my mind, it’s very Transcendentalist. It’s very (Protestant, white, northerner) American. For that matter, I think the 1994 film with Winona Ryder and Susan Sarandon, directed by Gillian Armstrong, is close to perfect. Not only is the adaptation faithful, but it showcases the humanity and sweetness of the story.  

So, how does Gerwig distinguish her adaptation? She peoples it with a strong cast, including Florence Pugh, Timothee Chalamet, and star Saoirse Ronan. Costumes are elaborate. Cinematography, gorgeous. The historical milieu is duly conjured. Gerwig plays with chronology, cross-cutting between the past and the present until one catches up with the other.

The non-linear storytelling worked well, as a device. Gerwig shows how the March sisters are haunted by their younger selves. They’re constantly asking, how do I measure up against the girl I used to be? The ideals I used to have? Who I wanted to become? Occasionally it borders on being a gimmick. But it works emotionally. That’s not my issue here.

Gerwig changes the material of the book.

Now, I’m not a total book purist. I understand the difference between two media. I don’t need every detail re-created exactly. The Harry Potter movies made some poor cuts, but they made a lot of good ones. The animated adaptation of The Last Unicorn gets weaker when it tries to hew more closely to the book (I have no nostalgia goggles for that movie).

The changes Gerwig makes are bad changes. In an attempt to show off her wisdom and metatextual savvy, she reveals a weak understanding of the text. In short, these changes are sophomoric.

What are my grievances?

Gerwig didn’t understand the characters. That’s strike one.

Gerwig tries to dabble with author’s intention. She knew that Louisa May Alcott had to be persuaded to have Josephine “Jo” March (her personal avatar) end the book in a socially sanctioned state of matrimony. Alcott never married. But obligingly, for her book, Alcott invented Professor Bhaer, and, Reader, Jo married him. Gerwig tries to spin this notion into her movie—but it comes off as a “gotcha!,” and it lacks all emotional sense because she doesn’t understand the characters (see strike one).

More on that later.

About the characters:

Jo’s characterization is shallow. Particularly as regards her temper. I’ve complained about how Kim Stanley Robinson depicted anger, and I will complain some more. In a fairly early (presented) scene in New York, Jo has asked her friend, Friedreich Bhaer, for criticism about her writing. He delivers his criticism in a calm, even tone. Jo then proceeds to blow her top at him, insult him deeply and personally, and storm out.

This event, the shame of it, looms so huge in her mind that, later on, she tells her mother that she can’t possibly talk to Bhaer again, because she made such a huge ass of herself when last they met, when she lost her temper.

… Look.

There’s not much of a point to jumping around giddily through the book’s timeline unless you’re going to use it for a good effect.

What if Jo started to blow her top—but then recovered herself? What if she took some deep breaths and excused herself and left? She could go into her room and punch a pillow or scream into a blanket. Because this is an older Jo, who knows too well how much her anger can destroy. And she may not have mastered herself completely, but an abrupt exit is still an improvement. That’s character development 101, and it would have fit in real neatly, and it would have worked with the time-jumps but nooo, we have to give Saoirse Ronan a big moment for her Oscar reel.

Then—now here’s a crime against literature—Gerwig doesn’t get Beth.

I admit she’s not alone. A lot of directors and writers in this mucked-up decade are stumped when it comes to Good characters. Goodness is confused with Flatness. And Gerwig clearly thinks Beth is boring. Beth is a softspoken nonentity: her main role in the plot is to die so that Jo has her Moment of Despair (another one for the Oscar reel!).

And Beth’s death itself is handled poorly. Gerwig takes the time to send Jo and Beth to the seashore, and wind whisks the sand around them. Then Beth tries to open up. Beth tries to talk about how she knows she’s dying. And Jo interrupts her.

Think, Reader mine, about your favorite fictional teams. Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Sandry, Daja, Briar, and Tris. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. The Swiss Family Robinson or the Baby Sitter’s Club, I’m not picky. Think of Pokemon starters, if you like. Maybe you can sum up each character with one key word. But. In combination, characters are not static. They poke and prod and surprise one another and the reader. Rock beats Scissors, but Scissors cuts Paper, which snuffs out Rock. That’s why it’s called a team dynamic.

All this is to say, a key factor of the March family’s dynamic is, Beth doesn’t speak up often, but when she does, her sisters listen.

By focusing on Jo’s denial, the entire sequence of Beth’s decline becomes a showcase for Jo’s feelings. One shot shows her in bed with her sister, holding Beth and saying, “Don't go quietly, fight! Please fight to the end, be LOUD! Don't just quietly go away!”

Putting aside the image of Beth squaring up for a brawl against the Grim Reaper, this is stupid. Does Jo even know Beth at all to make a demand like this? Or does Jo (or possibly Gerwig) think that Beth’s gentleness is weakness?

This is a desecration of the most heartrending section in the book. When Jo comes home after a long absence, Jo sees immediately that Beth is dying. And Jo realizes that Beth knows, but their parents don’t. They’re too close to see it and they don’t want to see it. When Jo arrives, Beth’s burden of silence is lifted. Jo listens as Beth talks about dying, about faith, fear, grief. By talking it out, Beth finds her courage. Her passing is tragic but peaceful, as full of grace as any Protestant could wish. The worst pain of it rests with those left behind.

But Gerwig makes Jo to be supremely selfish. Jo doesn’t want to hear Beth’s sadness or exhaustion. Jo wants Beth to be just like her, to be loud and confrontational. That’s immature, ludicrous. Can you believe the worst is yet to come?

There’s Jo and Amy.

Jo, the second of the four sisters, and Amy, the baby of the family, fight a lot in the book, especially in the first volume. They’re opposites in many ways, but also just enough alike to drive each other nuts. As sisters do, you know. This film gets a lot of mileage out of that War of Sisterly Rivalry… it gets too much mileage. In the book, the last sally of this motif is when Amy goes to Europe with Aunt March, which had been Jo’s dearest wish for years. Of course Jo is heartbroken. But she puts on a brave face for Amy’s sake, and she realizes that she (Jo) brought this on herself. Again: character development 101. Consideration and self-awareness. What a concept.

But that’s not good enough for Gerwig. In the film, Jo returns to Concord, MA, from New York, NY, in response to a note that Beth has gotten worse. Meg tells Jo that they haven’t yet written to Amy—they don’t want her to cut her European trip short. Jo says, bitterly, “Amy has a way of getting out of the hard parts of life.” Which is completely unfair to Amy—and furthermore not true!

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Amy. To return her to America would be expensive and difficult, and she might not even make it in time. If Amy did know that Beth was dying, she would move heaven and earth to come home in time, and the family knows that—because in the book, they do write, at the eleventh hour. The letter is waylaid, because guess what, 1869 predated the Information Age. The next letter Amy receives tells her that her sister is dead.

Yes, but you know Amy gets out of the hard parts, anyway how does Jo feel about this?

Gerwig, why hammer on this Jo and Amy rivalry? Why squeeze in the idea that Jo has been tragically wronged and Amy dances away from tragedy?

Why the bits with Laurie…?

God help me, it’s time to talk about Jo, Amy, and Laurie. The original shipping war—to borrow a fandom term. Shipping refers to “relationships” between fictional characters. I have my opinions. Yes, Harry and Ginny are the canonical ‘ship at the end of Potter, and they work fine… but a part of me always wonders, what if Harry and Luna had fallen in love? Or Harry and Cho?

Not Harry and Hermione, though—they’d drive each other nuts, if they ever got over the like-brother-and-sister bit. Hermione and Ron will live happily ever after, haters be damned.

That’s shipping.

And since Little Women was first published, many and many were the fans who thought Jo and Laurie, the boy next door, would be bound to fall in love and get married. More than that, they should. They were made for each other. Alcott had other ideas (remember, Jo was based on herself).

In the second volume, Laurie proposes to Jo, who rejects him firmly, and in despair he throws himself into European gaiety. When he and Amy cross paths again, they at first irritate each other (haunted by their own battered ideals) but then they reconcile, fall in love, and marry before returning to Massachusetts.

In the book, when Jo learns this, she is delighted that they’ve found happiness together. She knows very well that Amy and Laurie have much better long-term compatibility than Laurie could have hoped for with Jo. Laurie agrees, Jo was right to reject him back then. 

Gerwig has Ideas.

In the 2019 movie, after Laurie has been gone for months, Jo regrets having rejected Laurie’s proposal. She says, “I turned him down too quickly,” as if Laurie made a deep dark secret of his regard for her over years, of which Jo had no clue—instead of his marriage proposal being expected and dreaded for ages asitwasinthebook.

Gerwig’s Jo is so lonely! She’s given up on writing! She tells her mother, “If he asked me again, I would say yes.”

Wisely, her mother asks once and again, “Do you love him?” So Gerwig is thisclose to posing a very sharp question: how often in the past did women settle for marriage, simply because the future was empty and frightening and the guy was pushy? Gerwig comes thisclose… and then pushes it into the realm of the soap opera.

Jo leaves a letter in the post-box between her and Laurie’s house. Presumably it reads something like “Take me away from all this Laurie, I was a fool to reject you, you’re the only man for me, my home is in your arms.” When Laurie returns, he talks to Jo alone, and springs on her the surprise that he and Amy are married. The scene is played as fraught, tense, and sad. And Laurie says to Jo, “I will always love you, but the way I feel for Amy is different.”

That is such a weird, ambiguous phrasing. “Different” could mean anything. It could mean that he recognizes his fixation on Jo as the shallow thing it was, whereas his love for Amy is mature and selfless. Or it could mean Amy is good enough for him to settle for, y’know, since Jo is off the market. “Love” could mean anything, for that matter. I watched this after just having read Like Water for Chocolate, and let me tell you, man marries the sister of the woman he really loves, but the woman he really loves stays in the household, and a nightmare of lust and secrecy unfolds… it doesn’t end well.

And then! And then! Jo goes to the post-box and destroys the letter she left for him, while the sad music plays and the camera shows flashbacks of Jo and Laurie’s jolly companionship, like—oh, the tragedy, what might have been, what is now lost forever, alas alas

That’s not what Little Women is about! Little Women is about making the best of your life as it is! About grace in the funny and the everyday and all life’s bumps! About family love and adaptability! This is not your tragic tale of Love Gone Awry, Gerwig!

AND THEN

Remember Friederich Bhaer? The invented professor? Here he’s played by Louis Garrel, who is much more handsome than Gabriel Byrne (from the 1994 version, sorry, Byrne) and also looks like an adult, instead of a twelve-year-old playing dress up, yes I’m talking to you, Timothee Chalamet.

(Teasing aside, it’s not Chalamet’s fault; the costume department should have dug up some shoulderpads at least. Maybe a prosthetic chin.)

Bhaer visits Jo in Concord, unannounced. Jo is happy to see him, a bit flustered, then lets him leave. Then Jo’s entire family gives her this grin, and they inform her that she’s clearly way in love with Bhaer, hasn’t she noticed? Let’s hitch up the horse and buggy, it’s time for a zany race to the train station, before he leaves! Quick, Jo, run after Bhaer in the rain and catch him under his umbrella! Romantic smooch, amber lighting, the music swells—

And suddenly we’re back in the office with Mr. Henry Dashwood. Jo has submitted the final chapters of her manuscript, titled Little Women (get it? Get it?) Dashwood, who is acting as editor and head of publishing, flatly tells Jo (or is it Alcott?) that her heroine has to marry someone. Why doesn’t she marry the neighbor boy?

“He marries her sister,” says Alcott-Jo, prim and proper and a little cold.

What kind of editor can’t keep the main characters straight in this book that apparently is pretty important to him? I ask myself.

Then they haggle. Alcott-Jo agrees that her heroine will end the book hitched, but she wants a higher share of the profits, because she has after all “sold” her heroine into marriage for higher sales, shouldn’t she reap a better profit? Capitalism! The American way!

Then we slam cut immediately back into that romantic kiss in the rain. This time, it’s all schmaltz. Now the audience knows Professor Bhaer is fictional, even in the context of the movie. Not only did this never happen, but it extra never happened.

So… Jo and Laurie was a lost romance for the ages. But Jo and Bhaer are a contrivance to satisfy you, the audience that wants a trite romance to cheapen the Glory of Jo’s Accomplishment, and you’re stupid for being thrilled by this appendix ship. Gerwig slaps you in the face with it.

Gerwig, I’m frustrated because you tried to show off your savviness and butchered a perfectly good novel to do it. I’m frustrated because the world’s gone to shit and I want to yell and scream, but the neighbors would look at me funny if I screamed on the front lawn.

I’m also continuing a fine tradition from my creative writing classes back at Whittier College. Professor pAddy (sic) had to sometimes ward me off a peer’s story because I would take some innocent manuscript and run with it, scribbling red pen and asking, “But what if you did this? And this?!”

I’ve laced up my cleats and I’ve got my red pen. Ready, set—

Gerwig, what if you had that device of Jo and her editor haggling throughout the movie? Instead of just bringing it up at the end as a meta surprise, what if this was a framing device?

Picture it. A scene between Aunt March and Jo. Aunt March delivers a sharp bon mot, and sets down her teacup—clink! With a cut, we’re in the editor’s office. Mr. Dashwood automatically picks up his teacup, but it’s empty already. He consults his notes. He tells Jo, “We have to talk about Aunt March. She can’t have been that bad.”  

“Oh, but she was,” says Jo, refilling her own cup as she juggles sentences. “She was wealthy but sour, so she makes a good contrast to the poor but happy Marches.”

“Yeah, yeah, but Miss March, think about sales. Godparents and wealthy aunts are gonna buy this book for their nieces—at least, we hope. If the rich aunt in this book is a bitter old shrew, that’ll turn them off. What’s the harm in a little flattery?”

“Profits calling again, Dashwood? I hear you, but Aunt March has to stay prickly. The dialogue doesn’t work otherwise.”

“Prickly, yeah, but give her a heart of gold. Let her pay the train fare for Marmee or something.”

“… She really was that bad on the inside… but fair point, Dashwood.”

“Good. Now could you maybe dial back the sermons a little?”

“Never!”

You see, Gerwig? Work it in throughout, and you’ve got this whole meta story about art. What’s worth giving up in a book so you can sell it? How much should you trust the audience? For that matter, Jo is trying to impose a narrative on her family’s quiet, domestic life. That’s kind of a funny notion by itself—what does Meg think about her fashion and frugality-related morals? Speaking of which, morals are a thing that you can only really apply in retrospect. Sometimes, deep in retrospect. 

Alright, that’s the end of my peer-review for this product. I hand the movie as it is back to you. No red-pen notes: nothing I say can actually change the film as it is. Just like how nothing committed to film can actually change the printed text of the book. At any rate, I enjoyed this peer-review: even critiquing something that makes me mad can give me plenty to think about. So that’s worth something.

A final note:

It occurs to me that I’ve spent a lot of words taking Greta Gerwig, specifically, to town, as if she hand-crafted every frame of this film. Between screenwriters, script doctors, costume and production, coaches, directors, camera crew, editors, sound editors, and who else, oh yeah, actors, film is a collaborative medium.

Also, Little Women was the only film directed by a woman to be nominated last year for Best Picture at the Oscars. Gerwig herself was not nominated for Best Director, even though the movie had all kinds of positive buzz. I’m not calling out Jojo Rabbit, or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, or even godforsaken Joker—simply because I didn’t see them. I saw Little Women because it interested me, and I saw it again because I needed to spend a couple hours in a movie theater and didn’t want to burst out laughing at Rise of Skywalker. By accident I ended up spending three thousand words criticizing the work of one of Hollywood’s most prominent female directors of the moment. It’s unfortunate on my part. It’s also unfortunate that Gerta Gerwig made a flick like this, when she can and should do better.

Be well, faithful readers. I’ll be staying at home here in Los Angeles for as long as it takes. I’ll see you all when the skies clear.