Ice-cold take: the 2019 Little Women adaptation fucking sucked

I'm still mad about it

*The original version of this post appeared on February 12, 2022. Thanks to Adrian Rennix for editing! You can check out Adrian's terrific (and free) newsletter about immigration policy here.

One of my guilty secrets is that I love adaptations. Not ALL adaptations of course, but I’m generally in favor of the idea of adaptations, re-interpretations, general reworkings of older material, you name it. Yes, it’s tiresome the way the film and TV industry churns out lazy retread after lazy retread, chasing the dragon of popular IP, while new novels themselves seem increasingly designed as blueprints for a screenplay rather than as works of art in their own right. But the problem isn’t “adaptation” itself—the art of translating a pre-existing story into a new form or medium—the problem is copyright and capitalism. Adrian Rennix and I once wrote about the oddity of copyright, a remarkably new innovation in the history of world literature. Probably the best-known example of how literature used to work pre-copyright is Shakespeare: many of his plays are based on classical works or contemporary Italian poems, and it was common practice at the time to riff at will from stories that already existed. Much of this we now recognize as the “fanfiction” impulse, but contemporary fanfiction only exists as it does because of copyright law. Many adaptations of stories from one medium to another are, in a way, an act of licensed fanfiction: a loving and creative interpretation of a pre-existing work of art. They can also be understood as an act of translation: turning a book into a movie is a way of opening up that book to a fresh audience, capturing different angles of the original story and throwing a new light on a classic work. Adaptations and re-adaptations are great especially for classic works, because they keep a good story fresh, original, and up to date with changing cultural patterns, while preserving the memory of the past.

So for all those reasons, I really wanted to like the 2019 adaptation of Little Women. I hadn’t actually read the original Louisa May Alcott novel until recently, but I have fond memories of the 1994 film adaptation, the one starring Winona Ryder (I used to watch it over and over again with my sisters). The 2019 film was the fifth adaptation of Little Women for the screen, and it was very well received: with a star-studded cast and a brilliant director—Greta Gerwig, fresh off her success with Lady Bird—the movie was nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. But I put off seeing it until now—why? I couldn’t really tell you why. There was something about the discourse around the movie that put me off, I think—I kept hearing it was important, an important feminist film, a woman’s film for women with a woman director, and didn’t I think women were important??? I did. I do. But I’m also a woman who only sometimes enjoys stories about the experience of being a woman, being generally more attracted to what Louisa May Alcott herself would have called “blood and thunder tales.” There’s something irritating about being pressured to believe that a film will be good for you, morally and politically, and that by witnessing it you are doing a good act, for feminism. So instead that December I watched 1917 and Uncut Gems and the egregiously bad The Rise of Skywalker. I waited on Little Women, figuring it wasn’t going anywhere, and I could perform my womanly duty at any time.

It certainly was a duty. It was a slog, in fact. It simply isn’t a very good movie. People enjoy different things of course, and I’m not the kind of critic who thinks opinions, however well-informed, are equivalent to objective truth. But the 2019 Little Women—which received a 95% from critics and a 92% from audiences according to Rotten Tomatoes—is shiny and flimsy and clumsy. As a costume drama it’s entirely unconvincing. The dialogue taken from the book is delivered with stilted incomprehension by nearly all the actors, who rush gratefully into the lines that Gerwig wrote herself, which are not in the right idiom for the period and stand out like smartphones in the drawing room. (“So don’t sit there and tell me marriage isn’t an economic proposition because it is,” Amy snaps at Laurie.) Everyone is Acting At You, all the time; Meryl Streep is there, the queen of Acting At You, and everyone is trying to match her acty-ness. The characters in Little Women are iconic, famous in their own right, and it would be so easy for all these gifted actors to embody them, but they never really do, and you never forget who they are. Oh hey look, it’s Saoirse Ronan, it’s Florence Pugh! Oh wow, there’s Emma Watson! Which sisters do they play? It doesn’t matter: they never really become Meg, or Jo, or Amy. As more and more famous actors crowd on screen, the whole thing starts to feel like an awards show. Omg look it’s Bob Odenkirk!!! (I honestly got a little teary when he showed up, but less, I think, for the emotional line of the movie, and more because I really like him.)

The issue at play isn’t famousness itself: the 1994 Little Women was no less star-studded, with Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, Susan Sarandon, Christian Bale, and baby Kirsten Dunst (following her breakout role in Interview With A Vampire.) But all the characters feel real: they all seem to belong to the story, to a living part of a classic novel. The actors in the new version are Gen-Z stars in lovely costumes, highly Instagrammable but not actually believable. They never feel, as actors in period dramas have to do, like they actually go to sleep and wake up in this time period. Only Timothée Chalamet, carousing around as Laurie, manages to inhabit the past, but he’s almost too good; when he leaves a room, you wish you’d gone with him.

The difference between the two films is, I think, largely aesthetic. When you talk about “aesthetic differences,” people often think, oh, you just mean shallow, you just mean appearances. But of course a film is a matter of appearances. The 2019 film is beautiful. The costumes are gorgeous, the lighting is sublime, and the rooms are full of lovely things. “The March household glitters,” writes Georgie Carr in one of the film’s few critical reviews, “bathed in a golden light that irradiates the sisters and their surroundings. The beauty of the filmic world is laid on thick, the frame crammed with period detail. The Marches are often arranged traditionally, lit to be golden, long hair tumbling artfully, angelic in their cotton nightdresses.” But, as Carr points out (as does Eileen Jones in another excellent critical piece), the March family is supposed to be poor. This isn’t some minor detail. It’s a major theme of the story.

The 1994 film, by contrast, opens with a voiceover from Winona Ryder’s Jo, who immediately mentions their poverty. Their whole world is rough and woolen: their clothes are faded, the lace on their collars is worn. Even their finery looks tired and carefully mended, especially compared to the bright silks of the wealthier girls. An orange in Amy’s hands stands out with a pop of color. Again, this matters not so much because the film is required to show fidelity to the depiction of poverty in the original story—fidelity being only an occasionally necessary value in an adaptation—but because so much of the actual plot requires the Marches to be poor. When, as Jones points out, the girls give up their Christmas breakfast to a poorer family, “it’s supposed to be a painful duty...But Gerwig makes light of it, never establishing the Marches’ pinched lives in the first place.” The Marches’ poverty, in the original story, is all-consuming and unrelenting, with no room for error: Jo has a tendency to stand too close to the fire, and has scorched the back of her only party dress. In the 1994 version you see the scorch mark, and Meg exclaims over it in dismay. In the 2019 version, Emma Watson mentions the mark to Saoirse Ronan as they walk into a ballroom, but if it’s ever visible I didn’t catch it. There’s no ugliness, no mess, even when the dialogue indicates there ought to be. In 1994, the actors are all movie stars; in 2019, the actors are all movie stars and look like it, all the time. On Instagram, of course, nothing is ever singed. Nothing is ever old, or broken, or dirty, not when you’re seeing it through a screen.

The plot of the new adaptation isn’t about poverty, or family, or the Union homefront, or even about growing up. It’s about Jo, and her all-consuming ambition to be a famous writer. To accomplish this, Gerwig pares down the story of four sisters into a rivalry between writer Jo and artist Amy, and clutters it with proud or weepy conversations about female genius and empowerment. Of course this accidentally elevates Laurie’s role in the story, as the male point in the love triangle between Jo and Amy. The other sisters lose importance—Meg is reduced to a morality tale about how much poverty sucks, and Beth becomes little more than the cheerleader of Jo’s career. But in the original novel and the 1994 version, each sister has her own storyline, her own arc, and her own life. In a key scene in the novel, Beth confesses the seriousness of her illness to Jo on the beach, and they have a long conversation about death. In the 2019 movie, the scene on the beach is transformed into the sickly Beth encouraging Jo to write her book—to write it for Beth, who has dwindled from one of the four titular ‘little women’ into a mere catalyst for Jo’s actions.

In her adaptation, Gerwig chose not to follow the mostly linear plot of the book, but to chop up the storylines and leap back and forth through time. Beth’s first illness as a teenager is juxtaposed with her death as a young adult—it’s tragic and moving, reminiscent of the way that, in memory, different moments disconnected in time can be strung together like pearls.The other storylines, however, carry much less force and emotional impact, having been written out of the linear order that previously gave them a coherent psychological arc and purpose. This Little Women is meant to be a work of memory, of Jo (mostly Jo) remembering the process of writing Little Women, and the other characters remembering their lives as made relevant by being turned into narrative. Jo and Amy have a metatextual conversation about this very point, as Jo tells her surviving sisters about her novel-in-progress:

Jo: It’s just about our little life…who will be interested in a story of domestic struggles and joys. Doesn’t have any real importance, does it?

Amy: Maybe it doesn’t seem important because people don’t write about them.

Jo: No, writing doesn’t confer importance. It reflects it.

Amy: I don’t think so. Writing them will make them more important.

Of course, the implication is that if you don’t particularly care for the “domestic struggles and joys” as presented in this movie, then you must not think such things are important, i.e. you must not think women’s stories are important. This sense of “importance” is of course exactly how the film was marketed, and it’s how Gerwig herself has been marketed as an important woman filmmaker who makes stories about women. But if “importance” is the only quality that matters, then it provides a built-in excuse for shoddy filmmaking. It’s not necessary for an “important” movie to be aesthetically or emotionally coherent. It’s barely even necessary for it to be a movie.

Critics who liked the film praised its metanarrative qualities: Jourdain Searles says that the on-screen discussions between Jo and her editor “feel like a meta-commentary on Alcott’s own experience” and that “it is a film in conversation with its source material and one that, in turn, mirrors Jo’s onscreen writing process.” There’s a pretty glaring problem with all this meta-cleverness, however, and it’s that Alcott fucking hated Little Women. Both the 2019 and 1994 film present Jo’s “sensational” stories as something that she wrote because they would sell. In actuality, Alcott enjoyed writing exciting stories—especially those “featur[ing] liberated women following sensational passions across the high seas and in glamorous locales”—but didn’t earn much for them, and finally her editor encouraged her to, effectively, write a marketable YA novel. Alcott found the writing of Little Women “boring” and called the finished product “moral pap for children,” but little girls loved it, and it sold well, and Alcott obligingly wrote a few sequels before returning to her beloved blood and thunder. Both films treat the writing of Little Women as Jo finding a more serious and authentic voice; the 2019 film pokes fun at Jo’s eventual marriage, treating it as an artistic compromise made to satisfy the reading public: “If I am to sell my heroine into marriage for money,” Saorsie Ronan says, “I may as well get some of it.” The 1994 film features Professor Bhaer, in his worst scene, condescendingly explaining to Jo that she really ought to be writing about her lived experience rather than these silly stories. The conceit that “Jo wrote Little Women” belongs wholly to these films, and is framed by the (much more contemporary) assumption that a woman writing about womanhood is more “real” than any other kind of writing a woman could be doing. But of course, the real Little Women was an inauthentic sell-out affair in the first place, because girls at the time happened to like stories about girls, and coincidentally girls are supposed to like stories about girls doing girl things.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with stories about “girl things”; just as there’s nothing wrong with tales of blood and thunder. Both are just a matter of preference. Alcott herself had a complex relationship with gender, and that might explain, in part, why writing Little Women felt so artificial for her. There’s a great deal of gender subversion at play in the novel; at one point, Jo rants: “I hate to think I’ve got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China Aster! It’s bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boy’s games and work and manners! I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy. And it’s worse than ever now, for I’m dying to go and fight with Papa. And I can only stay home and knit, like a poky old woman!” It’s curious that, for a film that wants to embrace metanarrative, Gerwig’s film largely avoids Jo’s tomboyishness and the question of Alcott’s gender identity: its feminism is a feminism of girlbosses, of leaning in, of womanly ambition as strictly embodied by the striving of individual cis women. Amy more or less gives up on her dreams: the beloved March family only exists as the cradle from which a lone lady genius might spring.

The 1994 film also made plenty of cuts and changes, including the decision to add in some more overt feminist themes—Susan Sarandon is blessedly much spicier than the sugar-sweet Marmee in the book, and lectures men at random about the stupidity of corsets. Again, the fact of change is not the issue: change is necessary in adaptations, which are at once a translation and an act of loving criticism. But with so much money at stake, adaptations are increasingly less interested in telling a story, and more in the act of generating attention, creating something that looks enough like a piece of art to justify investment. If Little Women were the only culprit, I wouldn’t mind so much, but it feels increasingly like all that matters in a movie—or a TV show—is that it looks expensive and has famous people and the plotting takes some clever turns. “We didn’t need dialogue,” the former silent movie star hisses in Sunset Boulevard. “We had faces.” We don’t have dialogue now, or at least, not well-delivered dialogue: we have faces, and famous names, and flawless set design, and nonlinear narrative structure, and all of that is supposed to add up to something. And if that something was only entertainment, that would be fine—but these adaptations usually aren’t very entertaining, a fact which is plastered over by all the statements that they are something important, something you must see, something you can’t miss.

What you are not supposed to miss in the 2019 Little Women is the moral, which approximates to “brilliant women deserve to be famous.” It’s an impossible point to disagree with, but it rests on downplaying every other element of a person’s life. In the 1994 film, Jo publishes her novel, but it’s given equal importance to her other life decisions to found a school and marry the impoverished Professor Bhaer. (“I have nothing to give you,” he says in lines straight from the book. “My hands are empty.”) The original novel places even less importance on Jo’s ambition, which partly consumed her early life but which she now views as adolescent and unimportant. “Yes, I remember,” she says to Amy, as they sit in domestic bliss with their children and Jo’s students, “but the life I wanted then seems selfish, lonely, and cold to me now. I haven’t given up the hope that I may write a good book yet, but I can wait…” Gerwig downplays the romance with Bhaer in her version, because she wants us to understand that a woman’s life doesn’t end when she gets married and starts a family, but why should it end when she publishes a book either? Louisa May Alcott had to write Little Women to make ends meet, but why should we settle, in 2019 and afterward, for the goal of simply selling work, something that meets the supposed public taste, something that will make us famous? Greta Gerwig made Lady Bird—she knows how to tell a good, original, complicated story. That success, and Little Women, have led to her upcoming projects: a Barbie movie, followed by a live action Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. There’s nothing wrong with telling popular, well-compensated “girl stories”—but nothing necessarily right or interesting or artistic about them, either. There’s got to be more to strive for than this.