Let me start off by saying, for all the people who either hate-clicked this or smugly want me to validate your views, I am a feminist. I am also a fan of the story of Little Women. I had the entire book series as a teenager (Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men and Jo’s Boys) and I must have read it at least six times. I have also seen and enjoyed the ancient movie adaptation that starred Katharine Hepburn.
So I was fully expecting to enjoy myself when going to see the 2019 adaptation of Little Women. It has near universal critical acclaim and has a star-packed cast of very talented actresses including Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson and Meryl Streep.
But for the first 40 minutes of the movie, I was bored.
Now, I know the story well. It’s about four sisters who live in the 1860s around the time of the American Civil War. Each follows a different path and represents different aspects and desires of women in society at that time. Meg the eldest falls in love with a poor tutor and marries him, turning away from fledgling ambitions for acting to become a home-maker. Jo is a fiercely ambitious writer, who desires freedom and success, and is willing to remain a spinster rather than compromise on her beliefs or ambitions. Amy is a vain and pretty artist with middling talent, whose ambition is to “marry rich” and thus escape a life of poverty by becoming “an ornament to society”. While the youngest child Beth is extremely shy and introverted, a lover of music but with no desires to leave the family home or her circle of loved ones.
Dealing as it does with the domestic lives of 19th century women, this is a story that if not dealt with correctly, runs the risk of being dull and irrelevant to 21st century audiences. I never found the books dull. They were written in a way that made me empathise with the characters and relate to their conflicts and struggles even if I will never experience most of what they do. That’s the power of good storytelling and why Little Women has remained a popular book for over 150 years.
Little Women (2019) however, had me so bored during the first 40 minutes, that I got up and left the theatre to get an apple cider just so I could sit through the rest of the film. What went wrong? And why is the media hyping this film so much?
- Why remake a film?
Little Women (2019) suffers from the same issue most remakes have. It didn’t need to exist. A remake needs to justify its existence, artistically, by having something new to say to the audience of a new generation. An example of a successful remake is A Star Is Born, which has told an archetypal story over successive eras, each time remaining relevant to its audience. Another example is Romeo + Juliet, which finds a way to retell one of the most overdone Shakespearean plays in a way that’s new and interesting. Jane Austen is a writer whose works have been adapted endlessly, to varying degrees of success.
The problem with the vast majority of remakes today is that they are done solely or mostly to make money off a successful franchise/story. Little Women is one of these films. While watching it, I was painfully aware that this film was trying hard to capitalise off the trendiness of feminism in today’s media. “Woke” stories get positive media coverage and as articles claiming “Little Women is a feminist masterpiece” and “men who don’t watch Little Women are sexist” proliferate, it feeds the cycle of virality on social media, thus generating plenty of PR and hype for the movie.
There have been seven film adaptations of Little Women, 1917, 1918, 1933, 1949, 1994, 2018 and 2019. There have been television adaptations made in 1950, 1958, 1970, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1987, 2012 and 2017.
In order for the 2019 movie to justify its existence, it needs to do something that none of the other adaptations has done. It’s not like there’s been decades since another Little Women story was told. There have been four within eight years. That’s a new adaptation every two years. And that’s not counting the Indian adaptation that was made last year. So what new does Little Women 2019 bring to the audience? What does it accomplish above and beyond the other adaptations?
Nothing. In fact, Little Women 2019 is worse than some of the other adaptations, for reasons I’ll get into below. It’s not that it’s a bad movie. It’s just mediocre and redundant.
2. Feminism is “trendy” and “woke” films are popular (at least with critics)
One particularly insidious form of remake is the “woke remake” where a movie is remade simply because a certain ideology is popular and trendy in society. The motivation behind these remakes is not genuine passion for social justice or inequality. Fat cats in studios see that at the moment these kinds of issues go viral online and get lots of positive media coverage, and they assume that this will drive traffic to the movie as well as get them considered for awards. And Little Women 2019 is a cash grab and Oscar-bait.
Is it bad because it’s feminist? Well…
It’s true Little Women is a feminist movie. But the books were “feminist” before such a word even existed, before women had the vote, could own property once married, before they had any of the rights we take for granted today. It was iconic for this very reason and has inspired generations of women. I know it inspired me.
There’s a right way and a wrong way to tell these stories though. Storytelling is one of the best ways to engender empathy in people, to make them see an issue through a character’s eyes and vicariously experience their struggles. That’s what the book series of Little Women manages to accomplish very successfully.
There’s such a thing as “showing rather than telling”. A movie shouldn’t need to preach to its audience. It shouldn’t need to have characters launch into long monologues about the role of women in society, especially when it’s transparently doing so to try and telegraph as wildly as possible “LOOK WE’RE RELEVANT” to the audience. The audience is smart enough to understand the message of a movie without needing to be told, as if characters are breaking the fourth wall. A lot of movies do this nowadays. The otherwise excellent Marriage Story included an extended rant by Laura Dern’s character on the Madonna/whore complex and society’s different standards for mothers and fathers in society. The problem with it was not that the argument itself was wrong, but that the character delivering it (a divorce lawyer) was trying to manipulate her female client into becoming more combative and refuse mediation so that she would pay more money in law fees. The fact that the media picked this speech up with a collective “YASS QUEEN” and made think pieces on how wonderfully feminist it was, is symptomatic of the cynicism I feel about this kind of studio-funded virtue signalling. Just like the parasitic lawyer in Marriage Story, who doesn’t really care about feminism except when trying to fleece her female client, I feel like Hollywood studios are currently trying to do the same to female audiences.
That’s not to say no character should ever talk about oppression in a movie. But you can usually tell when it’s a natural and organic part of the story, and when it’s been shoehorned in. And there were a few scenes in Little Women where the characters seemed to be preaching at the audience rather than talking to each other. One was when Amy and Laurie were in the studio, and she tells him that “marriage is an economic proposition for women” because there were few ways women back then were able to earn enough money to support their families and once they were married all their money and property, even their children, became their husband’s. Amy then goes on to talk about how she is going to give up art because she’ll never be a genius and Laurie talks to her about “Who gets to define genius anyway? Only men. Why do you listen to them?” which isn’t exactly something a 19th century lordling would likely say.
Is the message itself bad? No. But the delivery almost broke the fourth wall. There was a way to convey the same information without the characters having to spell it out for the audience through these monologues.
Another scene was where Jo is in the attic talking about how “women are supposed to only love, but that intelligence and ambition are important too” and she wishes she could have both. That whole rant was unnecessary as what she was saying is what her entire character arc is about. We don’t need her to tell us that while she would be willing to give up marriage and love in order to have a career as a writer, that she still cares though and privately wants to be loved anyway. Because that’s the entire point of her journey.
The effect of these kind of scenes is that the film is trying to telegraph to the viewer that it is “relevant” to the modern audience and especially to feminism in 2020, thereby justifying its existence and artistic credibility. The problem is, the artificial messaging in these scenes only goes to underline just how far feminism has come since 1865. Far from making a universal statement about women’s lives, which a successful adaptation would do, this movie tries to use things like women not being able to own property in the 1800s, or women having to marry for money, to try and relate to modern feminists. But these issues, while very real back then, are no longer an issue for Western women. It’s not relatable. Therefore the more universal feminist message of the original story is actually undermined by efforts to appeal to “woke” audiences.
3. Artistic liberty and its pitfalls
In order to make itself different from the dozen other adaptations, Little Women 2019 takes a fair few liberties with the source material. The first and most obvious change is the way the story is told. In fact this movie combines both Little Women and its sequel Good Wives. But not in linear way. We start in the future, when Jo is in New York trying to earn a living as a writer. Then we flash back seven years. Then flash forward. And keep going like this for the entire movie. Almost every second scene is a flashback. And it doesn’t do the story any favours, in my opinion, as it makes it harder to get invested in the emotional journeys of the characters, because they are in different places all the time psychologically, and no sooner are we invested in a certain emotion than the film jumps forward or backwards, to something different.
This is one of the main reasons why I was so bored during the first 40 minutes, because I couldn’t get invested in any emotional arc as it kept chopping and changing so much. (It got better towards the end when dramatic things started happening, but that could also have been due to the two apple ciders I’d drunk during the movie.)
Another problem is that because the movie tries to combine two novels into a two hour movie, the romantic relationships are very thinly fleshed out. Laurie makes a dramatic declaration of love to Jo after the film invests only a little time into the buildup. But that is the most believable of the romances — his rebound to fall for Amy instead is even less believable. And Jo’s love interest Frederick Bhaer only appears in the beginning and end of the movie. As a result, the characters’ romantic decisions don’t make much sense to the viewer and thus we find it hard to care.
In the books, all of this was explained in detail, and made beautiful kind of sense. Laurie had a youthful infatuation with Jo, who was his best friend. Jo loved him like a brother but was honest and told him she couldn’t love him the way he wanted and thus even though he was rich and “everyone expected them to marry” that she wouldn’t, because she couldn’t compromise on her feelings and she could tell that they were too different in terms of personality to be a good match in the long term. Laurie takes it badly, but gets over it eventually. He encounters Amy while she is overseas and she actually confronts him about his bad habits, laziness, indolence and lack of drive. He respects her for this and becomes a better person as a result. Meanwhile Amy herself becomes a better person through enduring grief and reevaluating her priorities, and they end up falling in love and getting married. Jo meanwhile moves to New York, and becomes friends with a forty-year old, socially awkward German professor, who is one of the few people who takes her really seriously as a writer. He encourages her not to sell out her talent and compromise, because he believes she is capable of greatness. Eventually she does become a successful writer, and they end up together — he runs the school they set up, while she brings in most of the money with her books. Jo falls in love with Frederick, even though he is not as handsome or young or rich as Laurie, because he understands her and what her priorities are, and is a true partner to try and help her become her best self.
Now in the movie, all of this is only briefly alluded to, and anyone who had not read the sequel to Little Women would not have understood any of this backstory and thus would have been very confused when Jo ended up with Frederick, especially given she wrote a letter declaring love to Laurie only a short time earlier (something that doesn’t happen in the books).
The other change made in the movie is that Frederick in the film adaptation, far from being an older, homely, awkward intellectual, is instead a devastatingly handsome, young and exotic European man with no physical flaws. Which kind of undermined the book’s message of true love being not what you expect, but about a person’s inner character and how they treat you in life.
Conclusions
As a longtime fan of Little Women, I was very disappointed in this film. It does not live up to its hype, and as a film adaptation it is far from the best adaptation out there of this story. I recommend either the Katharine Hepburn film or the Winona Ryder film if you’re interested.
But for those who the media is trying to make out as being sexist somehow or threatened in their masculinity by this movie because they either don’t want to see it or didn’t enjoy it — don’t worry. I didn’t like it either.
(This is not to say the actors aren’t talented or that there weren’t some good scenes or that people who enjoyed the movie should feel bad.)
