CINEMA: Digby Ricci
THAT acerbically brilliant novelist and essayist, Brigid Brophy, once titled an essay on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women: “A Masterpiece, and Dreadful”. The “dreadful” aspects, inevitably, provoke the most enjoyable and unabashed tears: Marmee’s long- suffering, instructive “storytelling” (“So they agreed to stop complaining, to enjoy the blessings already possessed”), Beth’s affectionate “thank you” to the curmudgeonly Mr Laurence for the gift of the “little cabinet-piano”, and, above all, Beth’s protracted near- death (in Little Women) and her Little-Nellish actual demise (in Good Wives). Pleasurable such sentimental virtuosity may be, but it does have the meretricious ring of writing that plaintively demands emotional responses, rather than subtly inspiring them.
What saves the novel from being simply an invasively effective tearjerker is, of course, the ardent, unconventional Jo, with her disorderly chestnut hair, her “boyish” whistling and her literary dedication. Alcott’s depiction of Jo is both emotionally satisfying and artistically truthful. Authentic too is Little Women’s portrait of the gold-ringletted, grasping Amy, truly a Lorelei Lee in embryo, “the peroxided girl-doll golddigger,” as Brophy pithily puts it.
Portraying such cherished literary archetypes is no easy task, but the cast of Gillian Armstrong’s magnificent film more than meets the challenge. All the performances are credible and touching, and a few are astonishingly good.
Susan Sarandon’s Marmee, certainly more emancipated than Alcott’s original, is one of this gifted actress’ finest achievements. Admittedly, her Lillian Gish beauty (that rosebud mouth and those enormous eyes!) is a little too alluring for a model of maternal rectitude, but she manages to convey loving strength and to express domestic wisdom, without ever lapsing into mawkishness.
Winona Ryder (an actress who has not exactly dazzled me in the past) is a remarkable Jo. She cannot obliterate memories of the young Katharine Hepburn, a definitive Jo, both tomboyish and austere, in George Cukor’s 1933 classic, but she injects an infectious fervour and wit into her performance. I especially liked the element of self- aggrandisement her Jo occasionally displays. After confessing her fascination with the stage, she asks Laurie “Are you shocked?”, with a wide-eyed, enchanting pride in her own
A sexily matured Christian Bale makes the curly-headed Laurie much more than a Victorian pin-up. He gives the character a “solitary, hungry” longing that renders his distress over Jo’s rejection very real and moving. Gabriel Byrne’s Professor Bhaer, a Byronic philosopher prone to impassioned, hurried outbursts, is a worthy partner for Ryder’s Jo, and this is high praise indeed.
A director who unites Chekhovian attentiveness to detail with a panoramic sense of social context (as her extraordinary The Last Days of Chez Nous best demonstrates), Gillian Armstrong creates a Little Women that offers both splendour and intimacy. The overhead shots of the staircase in the Laurence mansion, with uniformed maids doing some last- minute polishing of the bannisters before the ball begins, are a succinct and telling indication of social prestige and wealth.
The extreme close-up of a bonneted kitten that introduces Laurie’s induction into the March theatrical group strikes just the right humorous, and affectionately debunking, note. The image of Beth’s doll collection sprinkled with crimson rose petals is the perfect symbol, beautiful and poignant, of this saintly child’s death.
Flawed the novel may be, but Armstrong concentrates on its still affecting complexities, thus creating a film of truthful sentiment, instead of tiresome sentimentality.