Little Women

You can’t have it both ways.

Greta Gerwig wrote and directed Lady Bird with a modest budget and a small cast and it was a wonderful opera prima; fresh, funny, and poignant. Her script for Frances Ha was also breezy and delightful. She follows these works with an ambitious, far more unwieldy adaptation of Little Women, the classic by Louisa May Alcott. Sadly, the enormity of the undertaking seems to sag under the weight, like a cumbersome Victorian crinoline. With a cast of thousands that includes Meryl Streep, Tracy Letts, Saoirse Ronan, Chris Cooper, Louis Garel, Timothee Chalamet, Florence Pugh, and Laura Dern, Little Women is a period piece with many costumes and locations. The movie made me wonder if the source material is finally not aging well. Jane Austen, it isn’t.

I read Little Women in Spanish (Mujercitas) when I was about 12. I remember liking it. To its credit, I still remembered vividly the differentiated, yet archetypal characters of the March sisters. Jo, the independent and spirited writer, made a huge impression on me. Amy was obnoxious, Meg was boring and Beth was sensitive and dying, so she didn’t count.

This adaptation of Little Women has the strange effect of being both fast-paced and, at over 2 hours, extremely long. The effect is not one of heart-racing alacrity but of tedium. This is a problem with the storytelling and particularly with the…