Barbenheimer: 'Little Women'

July 21 will see the simultaneous release of writer/director Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer and Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig from a script she co-wrote with Noah Baumbach. In anticipation of this momentous event, I am become BARBENHEIMER, the retrospective of worlds. We continue today with Gerwig's first sophomore outing as a writer/director, 2019's Little Women.

Candidly: I've never read Louisa May Alcott's novel, Little Women, and I've never seen any of the other adaptations of that novel. With regards to Greta Gerwig's take on the story, then, I'm probably an ideal audience member and a poor critic.

Having said that, I think Gerwig's Little Women is pretty great. Probably better than Lady Bird, in fact, because it's much more formally ambitious. In ways that, oh hey wouldn't ya know it, sometimes recall the work of one Mr. Christopher Nolan.

Unsurprisingly, given her earlier work, Gerwig imbues Little Women with energy and life: Characters are constantly speaking over one another in ways that recall both screwball comedies and Robert Altman movies (and, perhaps, Robert Altman screwball comedies). It makes the film seem fresh and spontaneous and dare I say contemporary. Stereotypes dictate that a story about young women of a certain class living in the 1860s should be stodgy and stiff, but nothing could be further from the truth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt6M4_IFR7A&t=40shttps://youtu.be/Uardz4ll9Lc

What is surprising is Little Women's non-linear structure. As told by Gerwig, the story jumps back and forth between the present and the past; in fact, most of the story meant to be from a novel Little Women, as written by Alcott's surrogate, Jo March (Saorsie Ronan). As I understand it, this structure is unique to Gerwig's adaptation - as is an end-of-story twist in Jo's eventual marriage is inserted only to please a male editor (welcome back, Tracy Letts). And as I understand that, it's what actually happened to Alcott, who died unmarried, as Jo vows she will. So Gerwig is course-correcting history while simultaneously commenting on that history.

It's heady stuff, and it's one that presents a logistical issue: How do you seamlessly move amongst timelines without confusing the audience? Gerwig and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux (Olivier Assayas' go-to DP) solve the issue by giving each timeline its own color temperature, allowing the viewer to easily distinguish between the two threads. This isn't a new trick. Off the top of my head... Steven Soderbergh did it with the intersecting storylines of Traffic (the scenes in Mexico are bathed in sulfuric yellow, the scenes involving the U.S. Drug Czar are all cool blue, etc.) and in Nolan's Inception, each layer of the dream has a very distinct look from the others (one is in the rain, one is in the snow, one entirely indoors, etc.). But it's a good trick! It really does help to avoid confusion.

And in Gerwig's hands, it's a meaningful trick, too. The flashbacks in Little Women are warmer, as is befitting of sentimental memories, and the present is colder, because, well, things aren't going so well for the March ladies in the present. But then, at the end of the movie, when life is good again, the present becomes as warm as the past. The visuals' warmth, or lack thereof, tells us not only where we are in the story chronologically, but what the characters are feeling emotionally.

And I know I just mentioned Inception, but honestly, the color-palette-as-storyline-compass isn't even the really Nolan-y part of Little Women. That honor belongs to the editing, once again by Lady Bird's Nick Houy. As with Nolan films - maybe most obviously, The Prestige - the shifts between timelines are always motivated. Early on, for example, Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) is leaving the March's home when he turns and looks into their upstairs window, where he sees Jo pacing and writing; Gerwig and Houy then cut back to Laurie, smiling, and then back to a different upstairs window, in which we see... Jo pacing and writing.

A little while later, Jo falls asleep on a train while on her way back home. There's then a near-match cut as she wakes up in the flashback.

And then, a little while after that, as Jo is walking home from the train station, she has another flashback, this time of her and her sisters walking in the opposite direction.

Even when not dealing with leaps from one timeline to another, Gerwig's structure is clever and profound. At the beginning of the movie, for example, we go from Amy (Florence Pugh) being lectured by her aunt (Meryl Streep) about the importance of marrying a man with money to Amy's old sister, Meg (Emma Watson) fretting about money precisely because she married for love. And then we see Beth (Eliza Scanlen, who I literally just found out is Australian ), who is sickly and dying, playing at the piano for an audience of no one, before cutting to Jo at the theater, blanketed in applause (a moment that becomes more heartbreaking after a second viewing, 'cause Beth later claims she plays for the pleasure of her sisters and no one else - that's the audience she's desperately missing in her introduction). It's just such an economical-yet-purposeful approach, and it's not one at which Gerwig's earlier work hints. We're watching a director become more self-assured before our very eyes.

I do have one fairly minor complaint about the movie, and that's the casting of Bob Odenkirk as Father March. Nothing against Mr. Odenkirk - I'm a fan! - but he has such a naturally comedic presence, and he's arguably best known for playing characters who are less-than-sincere... so when he walks in here, it feels kinda distracting, like you're suddenly watching the start of a Mr. Show sketch. My suspicion is he was cast because Gerwig wanted Father March to be played by someone with whom the audience has a strong relationship, because it gives more weight to his prior absence - they weren't just waiting for some guy, they were waiting for SOMEONE REALLY FAMOUS. I just don't know that Odenkirk was the right SOMEONE REALLY FAMOUS for this particular job. I think it needed someone with a little more gravitas. A minor quibble, to be sure, but while I'm offering an opinion for which no one asked, I thought I'd mention it.

One other thing I'd like to bring up, just because it made me laugh: There's a scene where the March sisters are imitating stuffy upper-crust British men. None of these actresses are American, though, and two of them, Watson and Pugh, actually are British. Pugh doesn't get much dialogue here, but Watson does, and it sounds to me like she's not just doing her natural British accent - she's doing an American doing a mediocre British accent. It's kind of incredible...

...as is Pugh's decision that Amy smokes a pipe while sticking her tongue out:

Lady Bird is fantastic, but Little Women is what gives me hope that Barbie will be something other than meaningless corporate product. Its post-modern, borderline-meta take on famous IP demonstrates that Gerwig can simultaneously celebrate and undermine her source material. I think Jo March would approve.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AST2-4db4ic&pp=ygUUbGl0dGxlIHdvbWVuIHRyYWlsZXI%3D