Look at the pretty dresses from the 1860s! Aren’t they so charming. Images courtesy Sony Pictures Releasing.
4/10 Louisa May Alcott’s original novel “Little Women” was published in two volumes in 1868 and ’69 straddling a three-year in-narrative timeskip, then published as a single volume in 1880. In this, the seventh film adaptation of the material, writer/director Greta Gerwig tried to keep things fresh by mixing up the framing device, and it doesn’t work even a little bit.
In Little Women, four sisters, Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth March (Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh and Eliza Scanien) grow up during the Civil War. In a series of scenes set over a period of years laid out seemingly at random, they angst about women’s lots in life in the 1860s, disease, boys, money and other petty squabbles as they grow up to become little women.
