Books are better
Jan. 20th, 2020 10:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustI'd read enough about Greta Gerwig's Little Women that I was curious to see it: nineweaving loved it, fjm (over on FaceBook) hated it, and both for what seemed to be sound reasons. I've just failed to find fjm's post, so this is vague, but she was critical of things which appeared to be details, but which misread the attitudes of the period, and of the March / Alcott family in particular. Hadley Freeman makes some related points in more general terms (and I'll come back to this).
We saw the film last Wednesday, and we both enjoyed it: I worried thatdurham_rambler, not having read the book, would find it hard to follow, but he claims to have absorbed much of the story by osmosis, possibly when we visited Orchard House -
- a tangential confession, here: I was surprised how big and grand the March family's house was, in the film, and muttered about typical Hollywood, everything has to be bigger and better.... It was, of course, filmed on location at Orchard House. Bear this in mond when I complain, as I probably will, about period accuracy. -
- I was glad to have been warned not only that the film does not proceed in narrative order through the book, but also that it rolls into one what I think of as two separate books, Little Women and Good Wives (which I think reflects how they are published in the US). The organising principal of the film appears to be the way events earlier and later in the narrative echo each other, and there were times when I was grateful that Jo had her hair cut, which made it easier to tell which was which.
This is no way to adapt a novel, and Greta Gerwig's film is not really an adaptation of the novel. Even bearing in mind the rule-of-thumb that the best film adaptations are the least faithful, this is less the film of the book than a film about the book. I felt as if I was eavesdropping on a book group which was discussing Alcott's Little Women: the participants had loved the book, but there was so much they didn't understand about it, and they picked an episode here and then one there to make a point as they discussed it. Why doesn't Jo marry Laurie? Why does she marry Professor Bhaer? Why does she have to marry at all? But what's just as interesting as what the reading group want to talk about, is what they don't want to talk about: they don't seem to have noticed that the March sisters are not twenty-first century young women much like themselves. This is what particularly annoyed Hadley Freeman, who complains that "... it's one thing to fantasise that we are Jo, and quite another to fantasise that Jo is us,"which is true. There was a lot of social kissing, a lot of calling people by their first name, which - well, I don't know, these people are Americans, no doubt they do things differently. I never expected to find myself missing Pilgrim's Progress, but it seems that Christmas really wasn't Christmas without those presents...
The bit which I, in my turn, do not understand is the casting of Professor Bhaer. Louis Garrel in undeniably easy on the eye, which is part of the problem: see above about Hollywood's preference for bigger and better, younger and better looking. I might have thought that Little Women was too intelligent a movie to be susceptible to this temptation, but consider the precedent of Mr Laurence, whom I remembered as older and more intimidating than this genial teddy bear of a man (though perhaps it is I who have grown older and harder to intimidate since we first met?). Perhaps, then, it was inevitable that Friedrich Bhaer should be younger and better looking than he was in the book, and perhaps the choice of actor determined his shift from German to French (after all, one European is much the same as another ... - perhaps he's Alsatian? And there's no need to puzzle out what this might imply about religious differences, because this film does not do religions...). But am I the only person who was struck by a physical likeness between Louis Garrel's Professor and Timothée Chalamet's Laurie? An older, more solid, Laurie, a Laurie with the weight of age and experience, but very much the man Lauroe might hope to grow into? Whereas Laurie himself is played as very young; by the end of the film he is younger than Amy ... Perhaps I'm reading this in a way that was not intended, but it's the one point in the film where I thought not well, I don't see it like that, but No, no! Wrong!
Tom Gauld has the last word.
nineweaving loved it, fjm (over on FaceBook) hated it, and both for what seemed to be sound reasons. I've just failed to find fjm's post, so this is vague, but she was critical of things which appeared to be details, but which misread the attitudes of the period, and of the March / Alcott family in particular. Hadley Freeman makes some related points in more general terms (and I'll come back to this).We saw the film last Wednesday, and we both enjoyed it: I worried that
durham_rambler, not having read the book, would find it hard to follow, but he claims to have absorbed much of the story by osmosis, possibly when we visited Orchard House -- a tangential confession, here: I was surprised how big and grand the March family's house was, in the film, and muttered about typical Hollywood, everything has to be bigger and better.... It was, of course, filmed on location at Orchard House. Bear this in mond when I complain, as I probably will, about period accuracy. -
- I was glad to have been warned not only that the film does not proceed in narrative order through the book, but also that it rolls into one what I think of as two separate books, Little Women and Good Wives (which I think reflects how they are published in the US). The organising principal of the film appears to be the way events earlier and later in the narrative echo each other, and there were times when I was grateful that Jo had her hair cut, which made it easier to tell which was which.
This is no way to adapt a novel, and Greta Gerwig's film is not really an adaptation of the novel. Even bearing in mind the rule-of-thumb that the best film adaptations are the least faithful, this is less the film of the book than a film about the book. I felt as if I was eavesdropping on a book group which was discussing Alcott's Little Women: the participants had loved the book, but there was so much they didn't understand about it, and they picked an episode here and then one there to make a point as they discussed it. Why doesn't Jo marry Laurie? Why does she marry Professor Bhaer? Why does she have to marry at all? But what's just as interesting as what the reading group want to talk about, is what they don't want to talk about: they don't seem to have noticed that the March sisters are not twenty-first century young women much like themselves. This is what particularly annoyed Hadley Freeman, who complains that "... it's one thing to fantasise that we are Jo, and quite another to fantasise that Jo is us,"which is true. There was a lot of social kissing, a lot of calling people by their first name, which - well, I don't know, these people are Americans, no doubt they do things differently. I never expected to find myself missing Pilgrim's Progress, but it seems that Christmas really wasn't Christmas without those presents...
The bit which I, in my turn, do not understand is the casting of Professor Bhaer. Louis Garrel in undeniably easy on the eye, which is part of the problem: see above about Hollywood's preference for bigger and better, younger and better looking. I might have thought that Little Women was too intelligent a movie to be susceptible to this temptation, but consider the precedent of Mr Laurence, whom I remembered as older and more intimidating than this genial teddy bear of a man (though perhaps it is I who have grown older and harder to intimidate since we first met?). Perhaps, then, it was inevitable that Friedrich Bhaer should be younger and better looking than he was in the book, and perhaps the choice of actor determined his shift from German to French (after all, one European is much the same as another ... - perhaps he's Alsatian? And there's no need to puzzle out what this might imply about religious differences, because this film does not do religions...). But am I the only person who was struck by a physical likeness between Louis Garrel's Professor and Timothée Chalamet's Laurie? An older, more solid, Laurie, a Laurie with the weight of age and experience, but very much the man Lauroe might hope to grow into? Whereas Laurie himself is played as very young; by the end of the film he is younger than Amy ... Perhaps I'm reading this in a way that was not intended, but it's the one point in the film where I thought not well, I don't see it like that, but No, no! Wrong!
Tom Gauld has the last word.
