Category Archives: Historical

It’s an unfortunate fact of life in 2020 that the merits of this remarkable film have been overshadowed by endless thinkpieces about how “Little Women” is just another example of “that one movie men won’t see” Enough. Put all the clickbaity culture-warring off to the side. Whether you’re male or female, a longtime fan of the book or a first-timer, “Little Women” is a fantastic film that demands to be watched and contemplated.

For those who don’t know, “Little Women” is a sprawling book chronicling the activities of the four March sisters—elegant Meg (Emma Watson), spunky Jo (Saoirse Ronan), serene Beth (Eliza Scanlen) and fiery Amy (Florence Pugh)—over a number of years. As the film opens, the March girls and their mother (Laura Dern, in a particularly inspired casting choice) must deal with the absence of their father (Bob Odenkirk) during the Civil War. Their lives end up intersecting with a constellation of supporting characters—melancholy young gallant Laurie (Timothée Chalamet), who dislikes his aristocratic upbringing and pines after the spirited Jo; status-seeking Aunt March (Meryl Streep), who’s obsessed with the March girls’ marital prospects; and many others.

(There are going to be lots of spoilers in the below. Over 100 years seems like enough time that this warning shouldn’t be required, but, here it is.)

In what may be one of the most audacious—yet effective—cinematic choices I’ve ever seen from a classic literature adaptation, director Greta Gerwig elects not to use a traditional linear narrative. Instead, Gerwig’s “Little Women” starts midway through the story—where a slightly older Jo, laboring as a writer in New York, is writing stories loosely derived from her upbringing—and depicts the book’s first half through flashbacks interwoven to form a (relatively) seamless tapestry. (For the most part, the movie’s “late-timeline” scenes are filmed with a colder blue hue, while “early-timeline” scenes are filmed with a golden hue.)

This technique has a number of immediate advantages. First, it enables the audience to meet Jo’s love interest—rumpled professor Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel)—early on in the film rather than deferring his appearance towards the end (more on this later). Second, it allows the book’s obvious emotional apex—Beth’s tragic death from scarlet fever—to serve as the film’s natural climax.

But third, and perhaps most importantly, the nonlinear approach illuminates clear character trajectories connectingwho the Marches were as girls and who they became as women. For instance, equipped early on with the knowledge that Meg chooses to marry a poor tutor over a rich heir, in observing her quiet contentment and compassion as a girl we immediately realize she couldn’t have made any other decision—her youthful choices and character are intimately bound up with her adult destiny.

All of the Marches have compelling arcs, but Jo’s character, of course, is far-and-away the most interesting—a fact Gerwig well knows. And accordingly, it’s the film’s ending—which suggests a striking departure from the book when it comes to Jo’s fate—that will undoubtedly spark the most chatter.

As book fans will well recall, “Little Women” ends with a weeping Jo confessing her love for the slightly eccentric academic Professor Bhaer. It’s an abrupt, but not entirely unearned, conclusion: we’ve come to understand that Bhaer brings out the best in Jo in ways Laurie simply could not. Midway through the book (and early on in the film), Bhaer challenges Jo to write stories of quality, not simply scandalous short pieces that will sell well. Jo, unsurprisingly, responds poorly to Bhaer’s honest critique and storms off in a huff. But both book and film leave no doubt that Bhaer’s analysis of her work—despite the seeming harshness of his delivery—is essentially right: Jo is at her best as a writer when she’s not pandering to audiences’ worst instincts. And so Bhaer and Jo’s eventual marriage makes sense: he is her true and proper complement.

Gerwig’s movie complicates this ending. In the film, moments before Jo confesses her love to Bhaer, Gerwig cuts away to a conversation between Jo and her editor, where the two are discussing Jo’s latest work—a book based on the March girls’ lives. According to Jo, her character marries no one—neither Laurie nor Bhaer. But—just as Louisa May Alcott’s own editor did—Jo’s editor pressures her to write an ending that will sell, one in which her character ends up married. The film’s “main” narrative then resumes: Jo and Bhaer marry and open a school for girls, in a golden-hued sequence intercut with images of Jo’s book, “Little Women,” being printed and bound.

What this implies, at least on the surface, is that the “canonical” ending of “Little Women” is a fiction, and the “real” ending is that Jo becomes an independent writer who marries no one at all. But I’m not convinced that this is the best reading of the film’s ending, for several reasons.

In perhaps the film’s most haunting moment, Jo fiercely exclaims “Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it!” That’s where the movie’s trailer ends the quote. But the movie itself does not—the quote actually ends in Jo’s wrenching confession: “…but I’m so lonely.”

It’s tough to imagine a more perfect encapsulation of the modern millennial dilemma than this. Men and women alike are barraged with messages of emancipation and liberation and autonomy, encouraged to keep options open and not close any doors. But all of that falls away in the face of the single, icy reality that we’re all so lonely.

“Little Women” strongly suggests that it’s Meg—who marries penniless John Brooke—who seems most truly satisfied in her life, despite the stressors of limited money, omnipresent children, and social expectations to maintain a certain lifestyle. This, Meg reminds Jo, is her dream. It would appear, then, that true happiness is intimately bound up with the inherent limitations found in being who one is made to be—not someone else, a creature of infinite possibility. And that, in turn, means that the best marriages are commitments within which spouses can bring out the best in the other.

An ending that grants Jo a kind of artistic fulfillment (publishing her book) at the expense of a relationship that brings out the best in her (marriage to Professor Bhaer) feels fundamentally untrue to the character and to the larger story Gerwig tells. That would mean that there’s no ultimate resolution to Jo’s aching loneliness, and no satisfying answer to why Laurie was so wrong for her as a match. (Also lacking is any explanation of why, at film’s end, Jo suddenly seems so much more confident in her negotiations with her publisher—it strikes me as much more plausible that a healthy and satisfying marriage produces that sort of confidence.)

Accordingly, I take Gerwig to be drawing a veil of directorial discretion over Jo and Bhaer’s life together, leaving their future forever a matter of speculation. Perhaps they move to New York together, or even California, allowing him to teach and her to write. (I’m fine consigning domestic, school-managing Jo to the realm of fiction.) And I think the film itself offers support for this kind of reading: Jo and Bhaer’s kiss in the rain is shot with the same blue filter that denotes “reality,” while everything after appears in the hazy gold of memory. That, to my mind, is a conclusion that both retains the integrity of the film and keeps true to the spirit of Alcott’s novel.

In any event, suffice it to say that “Little Women” is more than worth your time. I haven’t said anything about the production values yet, but they’re all stellar—especially Alexandre Desplat’s magnificent score. The performances are Oscar-worthy (Ronan’s in particular), and the set design is top-notch. Frankly, I would love to see Gerwig have a free directorial hand to put together an action movie—if “Lady Bird” and “Little Women” are any indication, we’d get one of the best, most character-driven action flicks of all time.

But at bottom, “Little Women” is great because I can’t think of a film in the last six months that’s provoked me to this level of reflection—and I certainly never expected, going in, that the movie would be this good. As far as I’m concerned, Rey, of “Star Wars” fame, has nothing on Jo March (or, for that matter, any of the others).

“Little Women” isn’t a chick flick any more than Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood” is a dude movie: it’s a story about life and about human nature, and that makes it well worth seeing (something I’ve often thought of, ever since I first read the novel, is that maturity means understanding—at a deep level—why Jo and Laurie couldn’t have ended up together).

Buck up, male moviegoers of the world. Time to shatter some stereotypes.

2015’s “The Witch” was a strange and mesmerizing little film—an exceedingly slow burn set in Puritan New England, haunted by stern religiosity, madness, and the ever-present specter of the supernatural. With “The Lighthouse,” director Robert Eggers turns his talents to a different facet of the American experience: the world of smoky oil lamps, windswept islands, and ramshackle buildings hanging over the turbulent sea.

As the film opens, young drifter Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) joins old salt Thomas Wick (Willem Dafoe) to maintain an unnamed lighthouse somewhere far from shore. The two men do not take kindly to each other: Wick proves to be a stern taskmaster, chastising Winslow for the smallest infractions and demanding ever-higher standards of obedience. Above all else, Wick demands that Winslow never ascend to the summit of the lighthouse, where the lantern burns day and night. And Wick is prepared to enforce that rule with violence if necessary. (Mistrust, rage, and possible insanity follow.)

From an acting standpoint, this is superb work from both Pattinson and Dafoe (I never knew how much I wanted to see Dafoe as a gruff old sailor—particularly one who tosses around some of the most creative nautical curses I’ve ever heard). The sound design is suitably unsettling, and the film’s 1.19:1 aspect ratio and black-and-white cinematography further evoke the surreal. It’s not exactly the most accessible movie I’ve ever seen—if you thought “The Witch” was slow-paced, “The Lighthouse” is positively languid—but it’s nonetheless effective.

It’s hard to call this genre horror; on a thematic level, both “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” are in some sense deconstructions of American history. Both films tap into iconic aspects of the American story, narratives previously immortalized in prior works: if “The Witch” unfolds against the backdrop of Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” “The Lighthouse” channels the ethos of Melville’s “Moby-Dick.” In that spirit, “The Witch” was suffused with concepts of purity and sin; “The Lighthouse,” in turn, wrestles with man’s response to the incomprehensible.

But where postmodernity sees deconstruction as as a disclosure of hidden human structures of power and oppression, Eggers’s deconstruction occurs on a deeper level. Rather than simply re-narrating the stories we tell ourselves, Eggers questions whether they were our stories in the first place. His movies are about the otherworldly forces creeping around the edges of experience, the liminal spaces where the human order blurs into the wild and pagan. On this view, it’s the story of civilization that’s actually aberrational; the eerie is the “natural state of things.”

As I’ve written before, this is a very old—one might even say premodern—view of the cosmos, one in which human ingenuity has little purchase. Indeed, “The Lighthouse” squarely sets up this dilemma: Wick is a man of ritual and superstition, and Winslow is a man of procedures and “reason.” Only one of them ends up vindicated.

Like the cramped cottage rooms it depicts, “The Lighthouse” is the sort of thing that some will observe and wonder what kind of person could find it appealing. It’s vague, ambiguous, and full of sturm und drang. And to be sure, this is indeed  a movie for a very particular sort of person—one willing to endure long stretches of strange imagery and atmospheric world-building in the hope of an effective payoff. On that score, though, it really does succeed tremendously.