Little Women (1933), 03 June 2021, streamed via Amazon Video
I know I usually avoid going this far back in time for movies, but Katherine Hepburn plays Jo, so I had to do it. Our first glimpse of Jo is her reading to a dozing Aunt March, then doing some impressive the floor is lava moves to get out of the room. Meanwhile, we meet Amy as she fakes crying to get out of trouble with her teacher, then tells all her classmates they're ill-mannered shrews with whom she wouldn't consort.
They're really leaning hard into the "Amy is the worst" angle.
I'd forgotten how…wholesome this narrative is. By the time the girls are gathered around the piano singing a hymn or whatever, I was legit hiding behind a pillow in horror. TOO MUCH SINCERITY. On the other hand, hearing aloud the frequent laments about not having money anymore is horrifying in the exact opposite direction. Have some dignity, kids.
Guys, there is no way at all Jo couldn't have known about Laurie's feelings. Dude was on the prowl from the jump, for real. But it feels like a huge leap in the middle: They go from just meeting to Brooke courting Meg and Laurie hinting he's in love with Jo. Too fast! We need acclimation time!
Anyway, they tried to win me over to Team Bhaer by having him wear a literal bear costume for his first appearance, but NICE TRY, YOU MONSTERS. I don't care that Jo doesn't marry Laurie--I mean, not much--but that she married Bhaer, that patronizing jackass, ughhhhh. His nickname for her is my little friend and ughhhh. Like, this Bhaer is less smug and more, like, equivocating, but it's almost as irritating, honestly.
Little Women (1994), 04 June 2021, streamed via Amazon Prime
This is so intensely 90s, y'all. Winona Ryder! Extra-young Kirsten Dunst! Claire Danes! Christian freakin' Bale! Susan Sarandon! Yeah, this is the Little Women of my youth.
This version gives us a glimpse of the girls doing their playacting all on their own, rather than simply for an audience. It goes a long way towards emphasizing the sisterly bond, to see that Jo's not the only fanciful weirdo in the family.
Having Jo and Laurie's meet-cute at the ball, rather than thanking the neighbors for sending in a replacement brunch, makes it much meet-cutier, but also makes it feel like Jo would have connected with anybody who happened to hide behind the curtain with her.
THAT SAID, I dig all the casting except for Jo and Laurie. Winona Ryder and Christian Bale are enough like themselves that I think of them as Winona Ryder and Christian Bale instead of their characters.
Tiny Kirsten Dunst is excellent at making Amy the worrrrrst. I'm really glad they kept in the book burning and Amy falling under the ice.
Laurie chiding Meg for having a low-cut dress is pretty gross. (Though I get why he'd be concerned that she was drinking if she never had before.) Thankfully, Laurie also seems to realize he was pretty gross. And then they have a lovely giggle when they hear folks speculating about the two of them. (Touched upon in this sequence: Slavery, child labor, temperance, modesty, and gender roles.)
Thus, I am much more interested in Laurie/Meg than Laurie/Jo. Laurie/Amy continues to beggar belief, especially when he straight-up tells Amy he'd marry any one of the March sisters. "I have always known I should be part of the March family."
As for Bhaer, UGH. They cast Gabriel Byrne, who is certainly dashing, which somehow makes his courtship of Jo seem more calculated and thus, gross. GET AWAY FROM HER, y'goddamn mansplainer. "There is more to you than this if you have the courage to write it." Yeah, I straight up yelled at the TV, "Oh go straight to hell, you asshole." UGH BHAER.
Little Women (2018), 06 June 2021, streamed via Amazon Video
So they decided to retrieve the story from its Civil War setting and move it to the present day. (Papa March is an army doctor in the Middle East.) Worth a shot, I guess? We start with a home video of the girls when they were younger doing their play-acting, and then slide directly into present-day Jo. The entire story is about Jo trying to get published and having flashbacks to her childhood in thematically significant moments.
Anyway, the first we see of grown-up Jo is her getting rejected by a bunch of publishing white dudes who doubt her authenticity. One of the dudes? Freddy Bhaer, because they want me to rage through the entirety of the movie. (I want to be all the way on Jo's side, but she does self-categorize her novel as "a high fantasy mythopoeic fable," and she lost me at mythopoeic. She wrote a modern update of Twelfth Night, guys.) Anyway, this Bhaer has the most punchable face, possibly because I feel like I have met this dude several times throughout my life.
Jo is a full caricature of an MFA student about to start dating one of her professors. She's the woman who only applies to Oxford with full confidence she'll get in. SHE IS WRONG. Laurie goes to Stanford and Jo just...does not go to college that year? Girl, there are legit like, a hundred colleges in Concord. Get some of your gen ed courses done.
The family isn't a wealthy one fallen on hard times; they're a bunch of home-schoolers who don't understand how teenage society works. Amy is still the worst. Meg and Brooke are accurately boring. Beth dies of leukemia. (Jo shaves her head in solidarity while Beth's in chemo.)
The first time we see Laurie up close, he's wearing a purple bowtie and a fedora. He wears a plaid suit to prom. He and Jo have zero romantic chemistry. There's legit no real evidence that they're all that close? Like, they hang, but still?
Meanwhile, when Laurie and Amy finally hook up, Amy says they've always loved each other and I'm like. Gross. And then, in a surprising turn, Jo says she's angry that anybody would be with Laurie even though she doesn't want him, what the hell?
This was not a bad retelling, but the way Jo was written is frustrating.
Little Women (2019), 07 June 2021, streamed via Starz/Hulu
All right. Back to a period piece! But this freakin' cast, man: Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Hermione Granger (I know, I know), Laura Dern, Meryl Streep!
And frickin' Chalamet, the latest floppy-haired sensitive dude to Tuxedo Mask his way through a bright young woman's life.
We start off in our "now," similar to 2018's version--Jo is trying to get published in New York, which means the specter of friggin' Bhaer haunts us throughout. They went to the effort of making this Bhaer seem only, like, seven or eight years older than Jo. NICE TRY. Bhaer's the-worst-ness isn't determined by age.
This script seriously assumes we know the actual chronology of the story--we go from the Jo in New York era to Amy in Paris pre-tragedy to Meg impulse buying beyond her means to Jo and Laurie's meet cute to Jo in New York again to Amy disapproving of European lush Laurie. We are unmoored in time and I don't think they've actually established who any of these people are, besides Jo?
You know, with Jo angrily rejecting Bhaer's feedback and Amy angrily rejecting Laurie's dissipation, we're really getting slammed over the head with the assumption that women have to fix their men.
Is there any man in Little Women that I wouldn't punch in the face, given my druthers? Nope. (Amy's "marriage is an economic prospect" speech would be much more wonderful if Laurie's dumb face wasn't there to disapprove.)
The boldest thing director/writer Greta Gerwig did was to fully Inception the ending. DID IT HAPPEN OR NOT.
I will say, however, that I could not stop laughing at Laurie being mildly freaked out when Bhaer shows up in Concord.
I've read Little Women multiple times, but after watching these four movies in a row, I'm starting to suspect I don't actually like it all that much? Like, I will sit through the whole story mesmerized and not know why.
This version gives us a glimpse of the girls doing their playacting all on their own, rather than simply for an audience. It goes a long way towards emphasizing the sisterly bond, to see that Jo's not the only fanciful weirdo in the family.
Having Jo and Laurie's meet-cute at the ball, rather than thanking the neighbors for sending in a replacement brunch, makes it much meet-cutier, but also makes it feel like Jo would have connected with anybody who happened to hide behind the curtain with her.
THAT SAID, I dig all the casting except for Jo and Laurie. Winona Ryder and Christian Bale are enough like themselves that I think of them as Winona Ryder and Christian Bale instead of their characters.
Tiny Kirsten Dunst is excellent at making Amy the worrrrrst. I'm really glad they kept in the book burning and Amy falling under the ice.
Laurie chiding Meg for having a low-cut dress is pretty gross. (Though I get why he'd be concerned that she was drinking if she never had before.) Thankfully, Laurie also seems to realize he was pretty gross. And then they have a lovely giggle when they hear folks speculating about the two of them. (Touched upon in this sequence: Slavery, child labor, temperance, modesty, and gender roles.)
Thus, I am much more interested in Laurie/Meg than Laurie/Jo. Laurie/Amy continues to beggar belief, especially when he straight-up tells Amy he'd marry any one of the March sisters. "I have always known I should be part of the March family."
As for Bhaer, UGH. They cast Gabriel Byrne, who is certainly dashing, which somehow makes his courtship of Jo seem more calculated and thus, gross. GET AWAY FROM HER, y'goddamn mansplainer. "There is more to you than this if you have the courage to write it." Yeah, I straight up yelled at the TV, "Oh go straight to hell, you asshole." UGH BHAER.
Little Women (2018), 06 June 2021, streamed via Amazon Video
So they decided to retrieve the story from its Civil War setting and move it to the present day. (Papa March is an army doctor in the Middle East.) Worth a shot, I guess? We start with a home video of the girls when they were younger doing their play-acting, and then slide directly into present-day Jo. The entire story is about Jo trying to get published and having flashbacks to her childhood in thematically significant moments.
Anyway, the first we see of grown-up Jo is her getting rejected by a bunch of publishing white dudes who doubt her authenticity. One of the dudes? Freddy Bhaer, because they want me to rage through the entirety of the movie. (I want to be all the way on Jo's side, but she does self-categorize her novel as "a high fantasy mythopoeic fable," and she lost me at mythopoeic. She wrote a modern update of Twelfth Night, guys.) Anyway, this Bhaer has the most punchable face, possibly because I feel like I have met this dude several times throughout my life.
Jo is a full caricature of an MFA student about to start dating one of her professors. She's the woman who only applies to Oxford with full confidence she'll get in. SHE IS WRONG. Laurie goes to Stanford and Jo just...does not go to college that year? Girl, there are legit like, a hundred colleges in Concord. Get some of your gen ed courses done.
The family isn't a wealthy one fallen on hard times; they're a bunch of home-schoolers who don't understand how teenage society works. Amy is still the worst. Meg and Brooke are accurately boring. Beth dies of leukemia. (Jo shaves her head in solidarity while Beth's in chemo.)
The first time we see Laurie up close, he's wearing a purple bowtie and a fedora. He wears a plaid suit to prom. He and Jo have zero romantic chemistry. There's legit no real evidence that they're all that close? Like, they hang, but still?
Meanwhile, when Laurie and Amy finally hook up, Amy says they've always loved each other and I'm like. Gross. And then, in a surprising turn, Jo says she's angry that anybody would be with Laurie even though she doesn't want him, what the hell?
This was not a bad retelling, but the way Jo was written is frustrating.
Little Women (2019), 07 June 2021, streamed via Starz/Hulu
All right. Back to a period piece! But this freakin' cast, man: Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Hermione Granger (I know, I know), Laura Dern, Meryl Streep!
And frickin' Chalamet, the latest floppy-haired sensitive dude to Tuxedo Mask his way through a bright young woman's life.
We start off in our "now," similar to 2018's version--Jo is trying to get published in New York, which means the specter of friggin' Bhaer haunts us throughout. They went to the effort of making this Bhaer seem only, like, seven or eight years older than Jo. NICE TRY. Bhaer's the-worst-ness isn't determined by age.
This script seriously assumes we know the actual chronology of the story--we go from the Jo in New York era to Amy in Paris pre-tragedy to Meg impulse buying beyond her means to Jo and Laurie's meet cute to Jo in New York again to Amy disapproving of European lush Laurie. We are unmoored in time and I don't think they've actually established who any of these people are, besides Jo?
You know, with Jo angrily rejecting Bhaer's feedback and Amy angrily rejecting Laurie's dissipation, we're really getting slammed over the head with the assumption that women have to fix their men.
Is there any man in Little Women that I wouldn't punch in the face, given my druthers? Nope. (Amy's "marriage is an economic prospect" speech would be much more wonderful if Laurie's dumb face wasn't there to disapprove.)
The boldest thing director/writer Greta Gerwig did was to fully Inception the ending. DID IT HAPPEN OR NOT.
I will say, however, that I could not stop laughing at Laurie being mildly freaked out when Bhaer shows up in Concord.
I've read Little Women multiple times, but after watching these four movies in a row, I'm starting to suspect I don't actually like it all that much? Like, I will sit through the whole story mesmerized and not know why.
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