The Greta Gerwig Trick For A Modern ‘Little Women’: ‘Make It Sad’

This content has been archived. It may no longer be accurate or relevant.

From The HuffPost:

Greta Gerwig kept pausing, sometimes midsentence. It was a Monday night in early November, and her newest movie, “Little Women,” echoed through the halls of the Manhattan theater where awards voters were among the first to see it. She shot it on film, and a projectionist needed to switch reels at the exact right moment so the action didn’t skip a beat. Gerwig was nervous. “It’s very easy to f*** up,” she said. She stopped periodically to listen, the sounds of the famous March sisters flooding our greenroom.

Nothing went awry, at least not during the 45 minutes I spent with Gerwig, who was beginning the monthslong promotional blitz required of a Christmas Day release that’s based on a beloved book and headed for Oscar contention. But you’d forgive those interruptions, too. “Little Women” isn’t Gerwig’s first solo directorial achievement — that’s the 2017 coming-of-age hit “Lady Bird” — yet it is the movie she was destined to make, as corny as that sounds. Of course she was nervous.

. . . .

Like “A Star Is Born” last year, “Little Women” is a testament to once-a-generation adaptations. The previous big-screen rendition, featuring Winona Ryder and Kirsten Dunst, opened 25 years ago, allowing enough distance to justify another interpretation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic text. (Before that, Hollywood had adapted “Women” five times, including versions starring Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor.) In the same way that Lady Gaga’s “Star Is Born” performance implicated those of Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland, Gerwig’s “Little Women” offers a meta approach to Alcott’s words and the reactions they’ve elicited over the past 150 years.

During their second week of production last October, Gerwig and her cast went to see “A Star Is Born” near Concord, Massachusetts, which is where they shot the film and where much of it takes place. “We sobbed our faces off,” she said. “If you’re starting with great source material and the heart of something eternal — I mean, how many productions of ‘Hamlet’ have there been? We revisit these because they say something to us. I think what was astonishing to me when I read ‘Little Women’ as an adult was how … ”

. . . .

Gerwig’s “Little Women” is a dissertation on the passage of time, the evolution of femininity and the weight of shared stories.

. . . .

“It wasn’t that I was looking for the bigger thing and then this was the bigger thing,” she said. “It’s that this is what I wanted to do, and it needed more bells and whistles. It needed the whole confetti factory. One thing that I loved about ‘Little Women’ was that there were so many different things about it that were new to tackle for me, [like] the world-building of the time period and creating something consistent but interesting but modern but genuine but period-correct but not slavishly devoted.”

Saying her “Little Women” isn’t slavishly devoted might be an understatement. Gerwig knew immediately that she would restructure Alcott’s linear tale, beginning when the four March sisters are adults and using flashbacks to navigate the defining recollections of their youth. Her approach is both reverent and fresh, wistful and progressive. Events unspool as the protagonists look back at a bygone time when they resided under one roof, poor but spirited.

. . . .

As a girl, Gerwig skipped the novel’s second half, finding the depiction of marriage and maturation unrelatable. Now, it’s what most interests her. For that reason, she wanted to make a “Little Women” for adults. Memories — “the way you’re always looking back to go forward,” as she described it — are a fulcrum that guides the characters’ sense of themselves. No single moment better distills that essence than a line delivered by a grown-up March: “I can’t believe childhood is over.”

. . . .

In independent-minded writer Jo, the second-eldest March sibling, she found a kindred soul. The movie begins with adult Jo (Saoirse Ronan, who also headlined “Lady Bird”) preparing to enter a New York publisher’s office to sell a story she’s composed. At first, we see only Jo’s back — “like a boxer,” head lowered, shoulders wide. Moments later, she’s running through town in a mad dash that resembles a popular “Frances Ha” scene wherein Gerwig’s title character sprints down a Chinatown street. (“I’m interested in women in motion,” Gerwig said. “Of course I am.”) Another two hours pass, and after gracefully hopscotching across timelines, the film concludes with a shot of Jo’s face in that same office. No matter the financial and emotional trials that intervened, she has won the match.

“I wanted it to be a palindrome,” Gerwig explained. “I wanted it to read backwards and forwards, so the movie starts on her back and ends on her face so that you could start the movie again from the beginning. It’s a circle.”

That quote alone defines the Gerwig who has blossomed over the course of the 2010s: literary, analytical, witty.

Link to the rest at The HuffPost

PG hesitates to draw conclusions from anything he sees in The HuffPost, but this sounds like a disaster for any who loved the book. For their sakes, he hopes he is wrong.

1 thought on “The Greta Gerwig Trick For A Modern ‘Little Women’: ‘Make It Sad’”

  1. I read your quotes from the article and was delighted. Then I read your “disaster” reaction, and was puzzled. Can you explain, please? Take this hill in a lower gear?

Comments are closed.