Little Women. May 12, 2020


Having recently read the book, and knowing some of the critical response this movie received, I was expecting a bigger, bolder deviation from the source material. Instead, this is a fairly straightforward adaptation. The two major changes I can see are an additional explanation for Jo’s decision at the end, which I thought was really great, and the non-chronological structure of the narrative, which makes this movie more of a character study than a regular drama. That didn’t do much for me, perhaps because there are four characters to focus on and it’s difficult to explore all of them properly in a single movie. Instead, it relies a lot on the performances, which are all very good (in particular Florence Pugh), but weren’t enough to make me connect with the characters as much as I did in the book. Still, it’s very enjoyable.