Greta Gerwig Created Something Beautiful and It's (not) Barbie

looking at Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, creativity and womanhood

I have not seen Barbie yet (having never grown up with Barbie, it’s just not my kind of thing), but all the hype and controversy about Greta Gerwig’s latest project made me want to go back and revisit one of my favourite films of recent years, Gerwig’s Little Women (I also just watched Lady Bird for the first time, but that is a discussion for another day). Now, admittedly, this adaptation of Little Women is far from perfect. In fact, there are parts that are really messy, inaccurate, and irritatingly 21st-century about the way characters say their lines, spout their speeches or just look modern. And if you know me, that should really make me hate Gerwig’s film.

But there is this story that tells what it can mean to be a woman, and I find that a very beautiful thing. There is the creative part too: the utter abandonment and exuberance of the writing and creative life that makes me want to pick up my pen and write.

Little Women shaped my youth in a way few other fiction stories have. It was like a story written for me, expressing my longings, dreams, frustrations, mistakes, joys, and delights. It said that girls can write and express their feelings. It depicted the rich complexity and beauty of sisterhood and the strangeness of the loves and hates of such close relationships. The beauty of faith and forgiveness, the bond of friendship, the simmering rivalry, the condition of difference, and fierce, fierce unity. But perhaps the most profound thing for me was the idea of growing up. Little Women… putting aside the beautiful, sad, hard, and glorious years of childhood and facing full in the face the agony and joy of adulthood - womanhood. The powerlessness, the weight of time passing, of people changing, or leaving your life. It said them in stories and images and characters and ways I had not yet even begun to comprehend or imagine as a teenage girl, at the cusp of womanhood. Terrified. Excited. Wondering. But Louisa May Alcott did. She found those words and breathed them to life in my soul.

What I love about Greta Gerwig’s version is that she tells this story for us, lovers of Little Women, those who grew up with it deep and near our hearts. While other adaptations might capture the historic reality better or the authenticity of each character or their plots, hers is wonderful in that it is a generative and creative story - she knows we know the narrative, and she honours that. She tells it with the awareness that we all have our interpretations and ways of thinking about this classic novel. But she tells the story seeing that story - not just what happens, but what it means. The layers of narrative editing, direction, and script complexity acknowledge not just Jo’s narrative (as wonderful, real, and raw as it is) but also dig into the lives of all the sisters, individually and collectively, together. What life means for them with and against each other with the passing of time and memories— of looking back to those golden days together, of struggling on into the present, and of the growing pains they must face alone.

A lot has been said about the way Florance Pugh brings Amy to the forefront of our imaginations and really makes us understand and even love her in a way we didn’t before. She shines in this film, with her impetuous childishness, love of beautiful things, pressure to make something of herself, and struggle to live in the shadow of Jo’s passionate nature while having just as many big ambitions, dreams, and loves. Then there is also the way Gerwig acknowledges the different and rich kinds of experiences of womanhood—like Meg, who feels the calling to motherhood and being a wife and homemaker and celebrates the joys, hardships, and struggles of it. Calling it good. Because it is!! The joy of it! There are the ones who don’t feel a great ambition to stray far from home, like Beth, but are rather content to be present, love, and give of themselves to those near and dear to them, quietly cherishing those quiet dreams and loves. Beth in the novel can come across as this perfect little martyr saint - sweet and precious but a bit flat and unrelatable—but I think she has the possibility of depth and dimension, disappointed hopes, and struggling dreams - the same way her sisters do.

And then, of course, we get our Jo. Saoirse Ronan’s Jo has this urgent, passionate, expectant desire to write; the stories brim in her soul and flow through her fingertips and pen onto paper. Ink stains. It is desperate, creative, exhausting, and joyous. I love the way she captures her abandon and willingness to drive her canoe and embrace the life of singleness and creativity. Wrestling with dreams and lives unlived, the sense of being tied down, and having to wait. But also her coming to terms with a reality—the experience of loneliness. Of something being missing. Longing for love and a place to belong. A home. She captures the ache of that and the growth that comes after—realising that there is beauty in what is quiet, unassuming, and ordinary. That greatness is wrought in the lonely, difficult moments, not just in the glorious ones. And writing about those griefs and joys—really baring your soul and writing vulnerably, simply, and truly—is worth so much.

That’s partly why I love the 2019 Little Women (I say this having loved several other Alcott adaptations). From a film standpoint, I am reminded just how brilliantly Gerwig adapts the novel and very deliberately uses some wonderful creative techniques to show this story: the non-linear, parallel narrative timelines, the tonal quality, the overlapping dialogues told “at the speed of life, the ways girls talk, the way sisters are.” Best (though maybe most controversial) of all, I love the way Gerwig blended the lives of fictive author Jo March and real author Louisa May Alcott into this one woman at the end in a very meta kind of way. Gerwig honours I think, in this way, the legacy of Alcott, the wonderful author. She gets to create this book and share it with you and me, opening up her world to us. The world of these four, beautiful little women.

P.S. I was inspired to do this post after watching the Behind the Curtain video, “How I Wrote Little Women - Greta Gerwig’s Writing Advice”. If you are struggling through a writing rut, this video will inspire you, a bit like Little Women itself does.

If you’ve watched this film, read the book, or seen other adaptations, I’d love to hear from you :). Let’s discuss together in the comments the things you loved and hated about this film.