[Movie] Little Women. 2019 Movie Review.

Little Women is one of the stories that gets retold over and over, and the one most people talk about nowadays is Greta Gerwig's 2019 version, which it's easy to see why the story stuck with people like that, it follows four sisters growing up together in Massachusetts at and after the Civil War, and at that time, well, it didn't really leave a lot of room for women to want anything else.

It's easy to see that Jo, played by Saoirse Ronan,she takes a lot of the emotional burden of the story, she's headstrong, restless, she doesn't conform to what was expected of women at the time, she doesn't just go by the book, she wants to write, she wants to make her own life, she's a force to be reckoned with and she resists the typical path so much so that at times she feels almost isolated, and that's what makes her feel so real.

Opposite enough, kind of, Meg, is the oldest sister, who wants the traditional life, marriage, a family, stability, and the movie doesn't morally condemn her for that either, which I appreciated, hehe, if you know you know,
while Beth is the quiet one, gentle, kind, more comfortable at home than out chasing dreams in the world, and her arc is honestly the most emotionally loaded part of the whole story.

Then there is Amy, the youngest, who is initially almost as self centered as Jo and is bratty, but by the end turns out to be just as ambitious in her ways, but more realistic about what a woman could achieve at that time, more practical in her approach to life, marriage and art and eventually to marriage as a ploy rather than a romance.

The strength of this particular version is how Gerwig chose to relate it, The movie doesn't proceed from the start to the end as a child to an adult, but instead jumps from one scene to another, sometimes of a younger child, sometimes of an older adult, alternating between the two, so that you're seeing the child at the same time as you're seeing the adult and sometimes it's the child innocently remembering a happy time in his past, and sometimes it's the adult remembering a difficult time in his past, and in some instances, the child will be hearing the adult's voice.

I think the dynamic between the sisters is the core of the entire movie, their bickering, their secrets, their fierce loyalty and loyalties even when they are at odds it's all lived in and real. Their mother, Marmee, played by Laura Dern, is a quiet strength that holds the family together, and is where much of the family's strength lies.

There's that layer, because of how Jo's story ends, how she's actually the author of her own story rather than having someone else write the ending for her, and that's hit different knowing the meta layer Gerwig was clearly playing with in all of that.

It's a tale of sisters, ambition, loss, and what goes through your own head when you have to decide which parts of the tradition you keep and which parts you rewrite for yourself , every sister has their own unique path and a balance that is difficult to execute well.

What a nice watch.

_IMDB