Little Women — Movie Review
by KJ Proulx
From books to plays, to films, the Little Women story is one of those stories that just keeps getting updated, which isn’t a bad thing, as long as they are doing it for a specific reason and not because they are out of ideas. Thankfully, it’s very clear that this adaptation was updated for the modern age, which felt like a strong enough reason when watching it. Now, I’ll be very upfront with this before diving into my review and state that I don’t have any knowledge of this classic material, prior to viewing this movie, so it felt pretty fresh to me. For that reason, you may want to take this review with a grain of salt, but here’s why I believe the 2019 version of Little Women is worth your time.
Flashing back and forth between time periods, the focal point of this film is Jo March (Saoirse Ronan) and her writing ambitions. The film begins and concludes with her story, but the rest of the movie places her sisters Meg (Emma Watson), Amy (Florence Pugh), and Beth (Eliza Scanlen) at the forefront as well. All trying to find a man to love and discovering what love truly is, these young women strive to become something greater than how they grew up. Diving into very emotional struggles as the film goes on, there is quite a bit of depth to this story. Loss and relationships are what kept this film emotionally resonant with me and I believe the care that was put into the characters is what made it work so well.
It doesn’t hurt that the cast was so well constructed, but I believe the shining star here is director Greta Gerwig. Although I feel that this is a very solid film like all of her previous works (as she has yet to blow me away), she definitely seems to be improving, every single time she steps behind the camera. This is her best film to date in my opinion. The way she was able to bring such raw and realistic performances out of these actresses was amazing. Timothee Chalamet is also an actor on the rise to super-stardom and his presence here was nothing short of fantastic either.
Little Women is filled with some very well-done cinematography by Yorick Le Saux and I also found Nick Houy’s editing style to be pretty special as well. With that said, the main thing that deterred me from loving this film was the pacing. There are times, especially throughout the majority of the second act where the movie seemed to really slow down. Yes, these moments were buoyed by effective drama, but I found myself waiting for the next scene to come on a few occasions. This is a wonderful film that I just found to be a little too slow.
In the end, although the pacing of this movie did hurt my experience a little, which doesn’t usually happen with slow-paced films, I still was able to really admire it. Little Women is a fantastic effort by director Greta Gerwig and many of the technical aspects stood out to me as well. Quick shout out to the set design and costume work as well, as those will probably be worth of awards very soon. This is a wonderful movie from start to finish and it deserves all the praise it’s receiving, but I just didn’t quite love it myself. Still, it’s a very good movie nonetheless.
Rating: 4/5
Check out the trailer below:
