But someone who makes her laugh, who brings out her goofier side, who inspires and charms her? I could totally see Jo with Laurie. She’s got plenty of other people in her life for that: her publisher, her readers, her family. And for another, I don’t assume that what Jo really needed in a partner was someone who could validate her talent. But I never bought it.įor one thing, I don’t think Alcott even really wanted us to - in a now-famous letter to a friend, she called Bhaer “a funny match” she came up with “out of perversity” in the face of readers’ demands that Jo marry someone. He’s too frivolous, too vain, while the professor, her true match, is committed to an intellectual life and takes her work seriously. True believers in the ending of Alcott’s novel, which sees Jo fall for the middle-aged German immigrant Professor Bhaer (played by Louis Garrel in the new movie), tend to argue that Laurie was never the right fit for Jo. I, however, was thrilled by the choice to have Jo second-guess the way she’d rejected Laurie. Like me, she and her mother are Little Women superfans (of both Alcott’s book and Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 adaptation, in particular), and they couldn’t believe that Gerwig had dared portray Jo with a new dose of doubt. “What…is…happening!?” my cousin whisper-yelled. I saw Little Women in my hometown theater with my aunt and my cousin when Jo put that letter into the mailbox where she, her sisters, and Laurie would correspond between their houses as children, they were absolutely losing it.
She even goes so far as to write Laurie a letter, before he and Amy return from Paris - where, unbeknownst to Jo, they’ve eloped - to let him know she’s ready to receive him at last. It’s one of many changes the writer and director made when adapting her source material for the screen in 2019, and a particularly emblematic one: Jo is questioning whether she was right to refuse Laurie (Timothée Chalamet), the boy who’s always loved her, the first time around. Greta Gerwig told Film Comment’s Devika Girish that most of Jo’s speech comes from another Alcott novel, Rose in Bloom, but that Gerwig wrote the loneliness line herself.
She believes that women are fit for much more than love, yes. Jo, who’d always vowed to become a spinster and drawn power from her stubborn sense of independence, is now questioning all the choices she’s made. But in the film itself, her monologue comes to a surprising conclusion. This was the bulk of Jo’s tear-streaked speech, which we’d all heard first in the trailer for the movie. I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for.
“And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. “Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts,” Jo tells her mother, Marmee (Laura Dern). And once Beth succumbs to her illness for good, shortly after Jo returns home, Jo - still alive, still unmarried - is utterly and profoundly lost. But according to Jo’s publisher, girls in stories must all end up either married or dead. Beth (Eliza Scanlen) is the only March girl who’s managed to avoid getting swept up in marriage madness, by virtue of her weakened heart after a spell of scarlet fever. Her sister Meg (Emma Watson) is happily married, though to a man who can’t afford to buy her pretty things another sister, Amy (Florence Pugh), is learning to paint in Paris while attempting to secure herself a rich husband. Jo (Saoirse Ronan), the heroine of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel about four sisters living in genteel poverty in Civil War–era Massachusetts, has recently come home from New York City, where she’d tried to make it as a writer.
There’s a scene in Greta Gerwig’s extraordinary new adaptation of Little Women that’s been shown almost in its entirety in various previews.
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