No liberties with the little women

March 19, 1995, Sunday

The opportunity for a new take on Louisa May Alcott’s much filmed classic has been fudged, says Stephen Amidon. It looks pretty, it’s faithful to the book, but these girls are simply too cloying for modern tastes.
If there was an Oscar category for Least Likely Hollywood Film, Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women would win this year’s prize in a walk. (Previous winners would include Ishtar, Ratboy and Tucker: The Man And His Dream.) Despite the long-term popularity of Louisa May Alcott’s 1869 novel, it is difficult nowadays to see it as anything more than a quaint relic, a literary tea-cosy offering tepid morality and cloying sweets for a generation of far coarser tastes. If the book has a place at all in our collective consciousness, it is in nostalgia’s attic, where it politely waits to be dusted off and passed on to ever-shrinking generations of dreamy girls.
Adding to the production’s improbability is the fact that there have already been three other film versions of the book, one of them a classic George Cukor’s 1933 edition starring Katharine Hepburn and Joan Bennett. Do we really need more versions of this story than A Star Is Born or The Great Gatsby?

To her credit, the director Gillian Armstrong boldy confronts both of these potential shortcomings. Nothing about her rendition of the story feels like a remake this is obviously the work of a film-maker intent on bringing a very distinct sensibility to bear on her source. Nor is this merely a highly funded trip down memory lane, like last year’s handsome, if uninspired The Secret Garden. Rather, Armstrong whose work includes My Brilliant Career and Mrs Soffel has attempted to create a film that tackles such themes as personal fulfilment, sexual equality and artistic integrity. Unfortunately, she fails fully to translate Alcott’s resolutely Victorian vision into a modern idiom, leaving the movie caught in a netherland between historical accuracy and contemporary expectations.
The film opens in a wintry idyll somewhat at odds with the gloomy voice-over delivered by our heroine, Jo March (Winona Ryder). Despite the fact that the March family has been cast into poverty by the father’s bad luck at business and subsequent enlistment in the Union army, they none the less live in a to-die-for house on a prosperous street, where Jo and her three sisters are looked after by an amply proportioned maid. Rarely has poverty seemed so enticing. Life is all sweetness and candlelight as the girls (aged from 12 to 16) dote upon their mother, compile a family newspaper and stage amateur theatricals. When word arrives of a truly impoverished family going hungry nearby, they pack up their sumptuous breakfast and cart it down to the shack.
It is in this early exposition that Armstrong and the writer, Robin Swicord, remain most faithful to Alcott’s maddening sunniness. After a few minutes you begin to wonder if they are having us on nobody can be this good. Even the arrival of heart-throb Laurie (Christian Bale), the lonely boy in the mansion next door who falls for Jo, fails to cause more than the slightest flutter among the little women.
Fortunately, Armstrong is too smart a director to stay on that course for long and soon starts to hint at the hothouse atmosphere created by four adolescent girls living in such close proximity. Conflict breaks out between Jo and her youngest sister, Amy (Kirsten Dunst), over a home-made play, which results in Amy burning Jo’s manuscript. A few days later, Jo cold-shoulders her sister while skating on a frozen pond, whereupon Amy falls through the ice and nearly drowns.
It is a powerful sequence that promises fireworks to come, yet Armstrong strangely decides to pull back from its implications when Jo, wracked with guilt, readily agrees to rewrite the scene to accommodate her petulant sister. So much for the budding artist. Indeed, sisterly rivalry is swept under the carpet so thoroughly that later, when Amy winds up marrying Laurie, we have almost forgotten that these two were once bitter rivals.
The proclivity of Armstrong to provide strong set-ups that are then weakly paid off carries on throughout the film. When the eldest daughter, Meg (Trini Alvarado), allows herself to be dolled up by some society babes for a ball, we once again sense that serious trouble lies ahead, especially when she proves the toast of the party and finds herself surrounded by a clutch of champagne-swilling lads. But the sequence is peremptorily wound up when Laurie appears and criticises her exposed cleavage. She caves in immediately, fleeing to the more demurely concealed bosom of her family, where her mother chides her for ignoring the ”workings of her mind and moral courage” in order to be ”purely decorative”. Is this feminism or Victorian doughtiness at work? Is Armstrong telling us that they are the same thing?
This is a dilemma that haunts a film that cannot seem to decide whether it wants to be an ode to traditional family values or My Brilliant Career II. Throughout, Armstrong and Swicord vacillate between espousing personal liberation and endorsing the self-sacrificing virtues of family togetherness. When her father is wounded, Jo raises the money for her mother’s journey to his bedside by chopping and selling her luxuriant locks. Later, she sits in her room and weeps, though the tears soon turn to self-mocking laughter. Like her, we do not know whether to laugh or cry. Scissoring off long hair can be a quintessentially liberating image for a woman, yet here it is executed strictly within the confines of filial rectitude. Not surprisingly, within a few scenes those glistening ringlets are once again sweeping over Ryder’s pretty shoulders.
Indeed, it is Ryder’s performance that is most illustrative of the film’s damaging dual-mindedness. Tackling the role of Jo must have been no piece of cake, particularly after Hepburn’s majestically feisty performance 60 years ago. Ryder seems to have decided to hit the low keys that Hepburn avoided, creating a sweetly studious little woman for whom rebelliousness is a secondary characteristic. We are never asked to take her mutinies too seriously they are always pictured as nothing more than a temporary aberration from the familial fold.
This is most obvious when she leaves home to pursue her career as a writer in New York City. The film sags woefully here, offering its least convincing moments. When Jo meets a sexy ”itinerant philosopher” (Gabriel Byrne, complete with sadly smouldering eyes and husky Teutonic accent) she turns into suet, kibitzing clumsily about Shakespeare and transcendentalism. When she is then called upon to rebut some patronising men on the subject of women’s suffrage, she goes out with a whimper, not a bang. Meanwhile, the relationship with Byrne hits the rocks when he tells her that vampire novels are perhaps not the sort of thing in which she should be investing her talent.
Jo hurries back home, where one sister lies dying and another is about to give birth. The Big World, it seems, is not for her. After yet another of her whimsical fairy stories is rejected, she decides to write what she knows, penning her family’s autobiography, which is immediately bought by a New York publisher. Byrne soon arrives with galleys and a marriage proposal, and the couple decide to form a progressive school. The question of who is going to be the head is not addressed, though my guess is that it won’t be Jo.
If Ryder’s generally strong performance is undercut by the film’s uncertain viewpoint, Sarandon’s turn as the saintly Mrs March is completely sunk. In the first poor performance of her career, a supremely inexpressive Sarandon is forced to utter a string of hoary bromides right out of a primer. It is hard to know whether she is meant to be a sweetly domineering prig or a proto-feminist 100 years ahead of her time. ”Don’t let the sun go down on your anger,” she advises Jo during one sisterly spat. ”I’d rather my daughter marry for love than lose her self-respect,” she later states. Move over, Ma Gump.
In what could have been a fine moment, Sarandon rushes to the bedside of daughter Beth (Claire Danes) after the girl has been pronounced incurably stricken with scarlet fever by a gruff, bewhiskered, patriarchal doctor. Taking one look at the sick girl, mother dispatches the maid for her herbal remedies. Within days Beth is up and around. But Armstrong refuses to expand upon the ascendant matriarchy implied by this moment. It is a pity, since you get the feeling she could have had considerable fun doing so, as evidenced by the mischievous way she has both of the film’s male love interests perform on all fours to the delight of young girls.
What makes this lack of a clear point of view more of a shame is that Little Women has much to offer. It is exquisitely filmed, free of bathos and generally well acted. There are some remarkably moving scenes, most notably when the shy Beth is called to the impoverished neighbours’ house to help with a sick baby. The mother, who cannot speak English, forces the kid upon Beth in an effort to get it to a doctor. We can see in Danes’s quivering lips and big eyes that she knows she should not be touching the infectious child, but she is just too shy, weak and nice to refuse. When she dies a few years later of complications from the disease, her maid strews flower petals on her empty bed in the most improbably poignant moment in the film.
If Armstrong had decided what kind of film she ultimately wanted to make, these moments would have jelled into something special indeed. But instead they are only unset gems. Like the novel upon which it is based, Little Women is too insistent on its rectitude really to move the modern viewer, too mannerly to truly charm. After all, these days a girl has to be a little bit bad to be really good.