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“Little Women” is an adaptation of the classic Louis May Alcott novel. It’s directed by Greta Gerwig and stars “Lady Bird” star Saiorse Ronan and Timothe Chalamet as Jo March and Theodore Laurence. The story of Jo March and her sisters, Meg (Emma Watson), Amy (Florence Pugh) and Beth (Eliza Scanlen) unfolds as they help others and pursue their passions of writing, acting, painting and music in the 1860s while their father is fighting in the civil war.
“Little Women” is a truly engaging and well-written adaptation that tells its story in nonlinear order to some success due to the consistent great performances of the cast and beautiful cinematography that encompasses the time period. This movie is a very good period piece that is consistently entertaining due to the lead performances whose characters are completely developed and paired with great costumes that truly fit the film’s time period. Ronan, Watson, Pugh and Scanlen give truly great performances as the sisters who all receive a lot of depth and character in the film’s well-timed flashbacks that continue to show why events are occurring in the present.
Laura Dern and Meryl Streep also give truly great performances as their mother, Marmee and rich Aunt March. “Little Women” mixes a good message about how women were treated in the time period while continuing to tell an engaging story about how each of the girls makes decisions. Even with the film’s nonlinear narrative that constantly goes into flashbacks, nothing in the film feels out of place because each of the flashbacks work toward the general goal of developing the main characters. One sequence where Jo March is discussing how she enjoys her freedom of being a writer and yet feels lonely due to her life choices feels both authentic and consequential to the overall plot.
The film’s camerawork and writing utilize the film’s setting and never feels as if any modern language was thrown into the script. Even when one of the film’s central characters makes a rather unexpected or borderline bad decision, there is plenty of context for why it occurred. In contrast, “Little Women” does drag on for some of its flashback sequences that bring in a lot of predictable elements that feel slightly forced in the films fairly complex narrative.
By the film’s ending, “Little Women” does truly have a few emotionally effective moments and a rather clever ending that feels as if the events of the book being written are coming off the page. Overall, “Little Women” is a well acted book adaptation that features enough development and well written dialogue for its lead characters. All of this makes up for the film’s slightly unnecessary non-linear plot structure that results in a predictable yet satisfying ending. I’m gonna give “Little Women” a seven and a half out of 10.