Ciao, cinemaphiles!
Our pre-Oscar party continues with a viewing of Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel Little Women.
The film is up for Best Picture this year with a couple of nods to Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay, but Gerwig – who really did do something new with her adaptation and really exercised her directorial muscles – did not get a nod for Best Director.
What do Ian and Dave make of all this? Well, let them fansplain it for you.
Thanks for listening.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
It was interesting to hear your impressions as first-timers to the story. I’m so glad you enjoyed it. I think Gerwig’s adaptation is beautiful in all aspects. But with the restructuring, you do lose some of the drama of the novel so it should come with a “spoilers ahead” title card. It made me wonder what the impact would be if you did adaptations of books like Great Expectations or Anne of Green Gables or Jane Eyre and showed the lead characters’ fight for survival as orphans in flashbacks rather than starting with Chapter One.
I like what the 1994 Little Women film did to get around the Amy age problem. They cast Kirsten Dunst as the 12-year-old young Amy and Samantha Mathis as the older Amy. I also liked Gabriel Berne as Professor Bhaer in that version. Gerwig takes an eraser to the book’s humble middle-aged German scholar, redraws him as a romance novel cover model, then casts a hunky French actor with a French accent to play him. He’s kind of like her Keyser Soze and we’re the guy interrogating him. “You want Jo to have a happy ending? You idiots! Professor Bhaer isn’t real! Don’t you get it? The real happy ending is that Louisa May Alcott got her book published!” Even if the author did marry Jo off just to satisfy her publishers, she still imparted a good message to her readers that it’s more important to be with someone who is your intellectual and emotional equal than to settle for someone who’s handsome and rich but whose affections you don’t return. I did like that she cast James Norton (the hunky crime-solving vicar from the Grantchester series) as John Brooke although he’s probably a little more hunky than a tutor needs to be.
You might get a kick out of checking out YouTube clips of William Shatner as Professor Bhaer from the 1978 TV miniseries. I remember thinking at the time that it was a little too much to ask viewers to separate him and Susan Dey from their signature roles as Captain Kirk and Laurie Partridge.
Also worth checking out is Behind The Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. I bought this paperback of gothic potboiler short stories and a novella when I was a teen. It’s fun to read the style of fiction that her fictional counterpart Jo is writing for that sensational New York magazine, The Weekly Volcano!
FYI: According to an article on the AV Club website: “The film’s opening title card is a red leather-bound book that reads “Little Women by L.M. Alcott.” At the end, we see that same book again, only now the author is listed as “J.L. March.”