To Weep With Those Who Weep: a kind of Little Women review
As we left the theater on Christmas Day, the big man behind me having dried up his sniffles and now denying he sniffled at all or even knew the names of the characters except, “Amy, was she the hot one?”, I gripped the hand of my husband. He was unashamed of his emotion, telling me later, “I had tears in my eyes almost the whole time.”
It was Nate’s first time to meet the March sisters though I have known them my entire life. First in a fifteen page abridged version for children, then the Katherine Hepburn film at my grandmother’s while my grandfather pulled tab after tab of Miller Lite and my brothers squabbled over action figures behind me. Then the novel at 13 or so (and 17, and 23, and 29), and then the movie that lit a hundred-thousand girls aflame—who all somehow saw themselves in Jo but never Meg, Beth, or Amy. It is the same with Anne of Green Gables and Elizabeth Bennet—is it that we see ourselves as the heroine or we see the heroine in ourselves? I don’t know. But I do know when we fantasized about growing up it was growing up into one of them. I watch the same three films every holiday season and 25 years later Little Women is still one of them.
I tried to imagine watching this new version as my husband or the man behind us, fresh to the faces of the March sisters, them mere bodies (hot or otherwise) telling a story and not the very epitome of the coming of age of nearly every woman they know. I tried to imagine it with new eyes, unfamiliarity, a struggle to keep up with the flashbacks or narratives playing out on the large screen. And I couldn’t.
Karen Swallow Prior hit on this precisely in her review when she speaks of the process of remembering and rereading. The experience for many of us in this viewing will be as familiar as our warmest slippers or the most insidious lie we believe or the feeling of coming home after a long day. For those who do not know, though, it may just be a well told story with beautiful girls in idyllic New England. Greta Gerwig refuses for it to be all that, though, which is something I think no other film version has quite gotten right. In the other versions we’re told a story, given something to aspire to, emulate, lines that resonate with us through our lives. But in this new version we are given a faithful adaptation of the March and Alcott families with a ferocity underneath it that could smell like anger to the unfamiliar. But it’s not. It’s instead the same thread of indignation that Louissa May Alcott carried through the semi-autobiographical novel on which the film is based. It was an acceptable (barely) form of protest for women in the 19th century.
I do not fault my husband or the man behind me for this being their initiation to the March family. In fact, I admire both the one who owned his tears and the one who laughed them off because to feel at all is a beautiful thing. Sometimes I watch men watching action flicks, their bodies twitching at violence, curving and swaying during car chases, and their chests puffing out during speeches of bravado or courage. It is very hard to be a woman (and this is why Little Women appeals to so many of us), but I think it is also hard to be a man, to live in a culture where they have to prefer war movies and westerns where women are merely physical and ornamental. How hard it must be to let the exterior crack, even a bit, to let the light get in.
There has been a lot of chatter by the ladies the past few days about this new version—and I’ve been chief because I unequivocally loved it, thought it was a masterpiece, and, without a doubt, “it may just be the best film yet made by an American woman.” But I hope the men will see it too, and I hope they will allow a tear or two to surface in the corners of their eyes. To weep, perhaps, for the woman around them who still feel like unrealized Jos, to feel for the women who still have to fight for equal wages and to be heard in a world where men still do rule, to let their exteriors crack for their daughters and granddaughters who will watch alight for the first time with this version, but most of all, to weep for their own selves. To allow themselves to feel it all: life and story and art and beauty and womanhood and protest and anger and joy and delight. To see themselves as more than one-dimensional automatons who must hold themselves together and relegate women to mere scores of hotness or good for fairy stories and lower wages and birthing babies and nothing more.
The women have owned their tears during Little Women for more than a century and a half. Just as I weep through Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers now, I hope men will weep for all the little women who aren’t actually so little as it turned out after all.
