Tropic Sprockets / Little Women

By Ian Brockway

From director Greta Gerwig (Ladybird) comes a sprightly told and warm hearted interpretation of the oft-filmed classic “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott.

The film is engaging, colorful and rich in thought. It also comments upon and mirrors episodes of Alcott’s life. Jo March (Saorise Ronan) is a teacher and writer who peddles stories from a “friend” in actuality, herself. The editor of the quarterly thinks her stories quite boring; “write something spicy,” he urges.

March does that and then some.

Central to the story is the concept that Jo is a trailblazer and outlier, resisting convention at all cost. Jo March is an intellectual siren, a spinner of words, a being out to transform the world.

Jo writes more and still more, always moving, perpetually creating.

Though Jo is at the center of this storm, there is also Amy (Florence Pugh), Meg (Emma Watson) and Beth (Eliza Scanlon). The family is held together by Marmie (Laura Dern). Most of the Marches, excluding Beth, do a good job of resisting the cadlike charms of Laurie (Timothee Chalamet) a professional at time wasting, though a loyal family friend.

The narrative blocks of shifting timelines are a bit confusing, yet they add a dynamic mystery to the story, making Jo March (Alcott) a freedom fighting catalyst of her own design.

Meryl Streep appears as the stern Aunt March along with Bob Odenkirk (Breaking Bad) as the absent but sorrowful Civil War soldier-father, and playwright Tracy Letts does well as Alcott’s anxious publisher.

Gerwig’s Jo March / Alcott emerges as a newly formed Mary Shelley, defying middle class convention, abhorring marriage as a dead end to progress. With Gerwig’s gimlet eye under honeyed lenses, the writer is a rabid writing machine alive with Frankenstein urges. She covers her floor with words and candle flames—fire and creation. The intellectual brain driven by a female pulse is paramount.

The magic of Gerwig’s “Little Women” is that it is made of flashes of color along with a teasing subversiveness. Underneath Gerwig’s pastoral Autumn colors, there exists a Difference Engine, strange and powerful, (both a woman and an actual film) able to offer the alchemy of Imagination to all.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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