With the Civil War and Reconstruction Era film Little Women set to open on Christmas Day, the reviews are rolling in. Nearly all are quite good.
A.O. Scott reviewed the film for the New York Times, writing:
“Little Women” — the latest of many adaptations — embraces its source material with eager enthusiasm rather than timid reverence. It is faithful enough to satisfy the book’s passionate devotees, who will recognize the work of a kindred spirit, while standing on its own as an independent and inventive piece of contemporary popular culture. Without resorting to self-conscious anachronism or fussy antiquarianism, Gerwig has fashioned a story that feels at once entirely true to its 19th-century origins and utterly modern…
Rather than starting where Alcott does, during an austere wartime Christmas, Gerwig introduces us to Jo seven years later, an ink-stained scribbler paying a visit to a New York publisher (Tracy Letts). The rest of “Little Women” zigzags between two periods in the lives of Jo and her family. Whereas Alcott traces their fates in a straight line, Gerwig (aided by the deft editing of Nick Houy and the musical stitching of Alexandre Desplat’s score) proceeds by association and recollection. It’s as if the book has been carefully cut apart and reassembled, its signatures sewn back together in an order that produces sparks of surprise and occasional bouts of pleasurable dizziness.
GQ says that the film is “a magnificent update of a timeless classic.” From the review:
Little Women is remarkably, viscerally alive. It moves at a furious pace, thanks to its tight script. Actors trade lines like they’re playing hot potato, speaking so fast that sometimes you can’t keep up—which is as it should be. This is a tight-knit family who communicate in a language of their own, forged from unbreakable sisterhood. They have so much to say that it spills out of them, as they constantly speak over one another to make themselves heard. Men frequently stare at them with equal measures fondness and bewilderment.
Rolling Stone was equally impressed:
It’s the Louisa May Alcott novel that most women cherish and some guys approach like Kryptonite. Thankfully, writer-director Greta Gerwig has not betrayed the feminine gaze that made the two-volume 1860s novel a literary landmark. Far from it. Instead, she shows why this story of four sisters and their mother, living in a house without men (their chaplain father is off serving in the Civil War), is both surprisingly timely and enduringly timeless.
Isn’t Alcott’s warhorse novel milked dry, you ask? Not with Gerwig, who scored a hit with her own coming-of-age story in Lady Bird, in charge.
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