The best-selling American novel of the Reconstruction Era, Little Women, will be coming to the Big Screen for Christmas. The New York Times has an interesting look at why we need this new movie version of a book that has been adapted at least eight times as a film. The article explains filmaker Greta Gerwig’s desire to see the movie made:
Gerwig’s film is less an update than it is an excavation — a kind of literary investigation of the characters, and their writer, and what they all really wanted. The result is a meta tale that cracks open the world of “Little Women” to make a larger point about the stories we tell about women and girls. Reading the novel again as an adult, Gerwig, who is 36, was struck by how modern its dialogue felt once she brushed away the dusty surrounding material. “Things were jumping out at me that I felt like I’d never heard before,” Gerwig said, like Marmee telling her daughter Jo: “I am angry nearly every day of my life.” Gerwig said, “That’s not something you think of as Marmee saying, except that it’s right there in the book. She says it.”
Gerwig studied the story, and Alcott’s life, until she found what she calls “the thing underneath,” which is Alcott’s depiction of “all of these inappropriate emotions for young women to have.” Gerwig’s adaptation feels modern. But “I didn’t invent it,” she said. “It’s there.”
GERWIG DOES NOT RECALL reading “Little Women” for the first time. “I always knew who the Marches were,” she said. “It got absorbed into the fabric of who I was.” Just a few weeks ago, Gerwig’s mother reminded her that she had played Jo in a community theater production of “Little Women” when she was an 11-year-old girl growing up in Sacramento. Gerwig had forgotten, but the outline of a memory surfaced: Jo was supposed to flop dramatically onto the floor, and Gerwig recalled thinking, “I’m not really selling this.”
Opening the book again in her 30s, she told me, revealed a porthole to her younger self. She had idolized Jo as a child, and as she reread the story, she found herself measuring her adult life against the expectations of her girlhood. “I think, as adult women, we’re always walking with our younger selves,” she said. “I feel like I’m always answering to her, about whether I’m being as brave as I could be, or as big as I could be, or as ambitious as I could be.”
Her film is the rare adaptation that centers on the March sisters as adults. It opens when they are at the precipice of womanhood, halfway through the book. The project of their creative girlhood has stalled, and life has become about making a living, or marrying into one. Then it blinks back and forth, from childhood to adulthood, investigating where childhood dreams bloom and where they shrivel.
Read the review from The New Yorker Magazine.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
