Little Women Review (Patreon)

I'm a woman of simple pleasures. If you put Saoirse Ronan in a movie, I'll largely be satisfied with it. But it helps that Little Women is a well-executed sophomore directorial outing. Gerwig handles her post-Lady Bird success with suitable aplomb, helming an ensemble movie where she can direct people like Meryl Streep and Laura Dern. Her characterization chops come in handy - the cast's strengths are played to while still pushing them into interesting places (giving Ronan and Dern a scene together is the wisest choice of the whole movie). It's largely to the movie's credit that it manages to do a period piece about women competing over their suitors in a way that largely prioritizes the interiority of the female characters and giving a nod to the struggles middle-class woman would have faced in the Civil War era. As a fun period romp, this was well done.

All the same, there's a disturbing myopia to the whole affair. While Little Women isn't quite self-congratulatory - it basically earns its exuberance - its strident white feminism is basically detrimental. This is quintessentially a movie about privileged white women striking it big during one of the most suffering-filled periods in American history, while only giving fleeting attention to that fact. There's some acknowledgement of class (this is the woman who directed Lady Bird, after all), but that the drama over who these women decide to marry is the focal point of a period piece placed during the war that decided whether black people would remain slaves feels tone deaf, particularly right now. My Latina partner broadly disliked the movie for that reason, and as we walked out of our local indie theater, I couldn't begrudge her that dislike. Little Women is well done, but it's also badly timed. No amount of Florence Pugh making feet molds for Timothee Chalamet can make up for the fact that Gerwig needs to write a screenplay with some POC and queer leads. There are lessons to be taken from Lady Bird, and Little Women certainly learns some of them, but it doesn't push in all the directions it should.