Louisa May Alcott acquiesced to giving her heroine a traditional happy ending. But Greta Gerwig was brave enough to twist it
as the indomitable Jo March, and respect the long-overdue redemption of Amy, played by Florence Pugh. Notable mention goes to Timothée Chalamet as Laurie, if for no reason other than his petite stature being grounds enough for a Little Men spin-off. Mostly I love Gerwig’s film because it allows us to see – inevitable spoiler alert − Jo come into her own in the final act.
Amid pressure from her publisher and readers, Alcott acquiesced to giving Jo a neat romantic ending with an older professor, Friedrich Bhaer. It’s arguably an unsatisfying conclusion because Jorepresented a consequence-free refutation of gendered strictures. She lived fearlessly, authentically and creatively. She was a guide for how to be a girl but nota girl. Having her marry Bhaer sent a message: that our imaginative lives are auxiliary to our domestic duties, or at best a folly of childhood.
Gerwig knew audiences haven’t felt an affinity with Jo’s fate for many years so she concludes her film with a meta-twist in which two endings play out in tandem. Jo writes an ending to her novel at the behest of her publisher in which her protagonist marries. We see Jo opening a school in cantankerous Aunt March’s mansion, surrounded by Bhaer and her sprawling family. But wesee Jo watching her novel being printed.
This new ending is a twist but not a twist of the knife. Indeed it’s deferential to Alcott, a nod to the end she wanted to write but couldn’t because of the demands of the day. The kiss in the rain under Bhaer’s brolly might as well be off-camera. Instead, seeing Jo behold her very own book is the stuff of deep, abiding love.
So, in an age of endless reboots, Gerwig’s Little Women is not a derivative cash-grab. In allowing Jo’s star to be born she has rediscovered the pulsing heartbeat of Little Women. Jo famously bemoans that she is “so sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for”. And she is right, in a sense. But also wrong, because loveall: not just romantic love but the love we feel for family, for strangers, for art, for creativity, for writing.
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