Little Women

Little Women (2019) is one of so many adaptations of Louisa May Alcott's 1868 novel that they are hard to count. What Greta Gerwig changed is not the story but how it is told. The novel runs chronologically. The film moves constantly between childhood and adulthood, placing the same room in two different times side by side. So a happy scene and the loss that follows it are visible at once. The real move is at the end. Jo sits in her publisher's office and he asks who the heroine marries. Nobody, she says. He answers that if she does not marry, the book will not sell and is not worth printing. Jo negotiates, agrees to the marriage, and takes full ownership of the copyright in exchange. That scene is not in the novel. It is what happened to Alcott. She did not want to marry Jo off, her publisher insisted, and she made that bargain; she herself never married. Gerwig puts the author's real negotiation into her heroine's mouth, and the film becomes one that argues about its own ending. Amy, played by Florence Pugh, stops being the unlikeable sister for the first time across these adaptations; her speech explaining marriage as an economic calculation is the best written passage in the film. Gerwig's absence from the Best Director nominations caused an argument that year. It runs 135 minutes. Good for: classic adaptation, period drama, and family stories. Less good for: the time jumps are confusing for the first half hour, and there is a death.