Modern Film Classics: “Little Women” (Christmas Edition)

Everyone has their annual Christmas movie rituals. Most people favour It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34^th Street. Less orthodox but equally worthy selections include Tim Burton’s the Nightmare Before Christmas, the riotous A Christmas Story, Die Hard (yes that is a Christmas movie and I will not argue with you otherwise) and two contemporary selections are Love, Actually and The Holiday. My choice has always been Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 version of Little Women.

Filmed in and around Victoria, British Columbia, an afternoon’s ferry ride away from where I live, this version of Louisa May Alcott’s classic stars Winona Ryder in her career-best performance as Jo March. For all of the hoopla surrounding her status as the “It Girl” of the 90s, this was the one role that should have earned her an Academy Award (she received a Best Actress nomination). The magical cast includes Susan Sarandon as Marmee, Clare Danes as the ill-fated Beth, Trini Alvarado as prim-and-proper Meg, a very young Kirsten Dunst sharing the role of Amy with Samantha Mathis, Gabriel Byrne as Professor Friedrich, Eric Stoltz as the tutor Meg marries, the late comic actress Mary Wickes as Aunt March and Christian Bale as Laurie. There has, at no other time in history, been such a completely perfect cast assembled to deliver breath and life to Alcott’s beloved characters.

Call the neighbours! Spreading Christmas cheer

The tale of young girls growing into adulthood is a well-known one. The March family’s father is a general and often away at the front lines, fighting for the North in the Civil War. Money is tight in those days, and having sausages and tangerines at Christmastime were luxuries. Without career prospects available to women in that era, the March daughters bravely take on odd jobs, watch the home, attend school and eventually take on unorthodox but enterprising ventures for themselves in that era. None of the March girls sit around waiting for husbands, for they are too busy staging plays for their own entertainment, writing short stories for publication (this is Jo’s vocation), making do with what they have in terms of wartime supplies in the house, and generally supporting one another. Seeing the way the actors interact, one could imagine that this was the template in contemporary fiction for the concept of “sisterhood” (and that doesn’t include mani-pedis or shopping detox).

Bale (Laurie) and Ryder (Jo)

There’s a strong feminist undercurrent flowing throughout the film. Jo is played with the right amount of feistiness and enterprise by Ryder, the result being a pre-feminist hero doesn’t suffer fools, but who trusts herself thoroughly and able to take constructive criticism, no matter how headstrong she might be at times. When the film was released at Christmas 1994, critics complained that it was somewhat anachronistic due to the lessons Marmee imparts to her daughters. I always got the sense that it was mostly the male critics who were too busy worshipping Tarantino’s then-new Pulp Fiction and dismissing this version as being too much like Murphy Brown. What was wrong with imparting wisdom such as the now oft-quoted Dr. Seuss truism about never minding the people who don’t matter? I could always tell in some of the less flattering reviews that none of these critics have actually read Alcott’s original novel, or if they did, they dismissed it as “girls’ stuff”. In a recent interview with 60 Minutes on playing Margaret Thatcher, Meryl Streep remarked that her female characters are always described as being “strong-minded”, and yet this adjective never applied to male actors. Using that same logic, I deduce that perhaps contemporary critics when Little Women was released felt the same urge to use that descriptor needlessly and mistakenly assumed it was “anachronistically feminist” or some such nonsense. Perhaps Alcott herself was somewhat progressive to begin with, did you ever think about that?

Sneak Preview: “The Dark Knight Rises” Prologue

Ordinarily, it would be vainglorious to screen the first few minutes of a yet-to-be-completed new motion picture, unless it’s presented in film festivals as a work in progress. Perhaps the best use of this was in 1991, when Disney screened Beauty and the Beast using then-new computerized animation blended with traditional hand paintings, heralding a renaissance in animated film. Perhaps the most recent example was Madonna’s W.E. at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, which secured it a distribution deal through The Weinstein Company. Whether or not the film is a masterpiece waiting in the wings or a misbegotten vanity project (if you believe some of the early reviews accorded W.E.), it’s a great way to gauge audience interest before a project is completed and can be fine-tuned.

Beyond industry screenings, few films warrant a public viewing the way that Christopher Nolan’s eagerly-anticipated The Dark Knight Rises can. Considering its predecessor’s massive box office (the third highest domestic total in history), its canonical status as one of the greatest American films of 2000s, and its magnificently ghostly Oscar-winning performance by Heath Ledger, it more than justifies a public screening, even if they only show the six-minute prologue. Tonight, Warner Brothers quietly screened the prologue for select audiences.

Nolan has a lot to live up to. The franchise was rejuvenated in spectacular fashion with Batman Begins in 2005. The Dark Knight was haunted not just by the genius of Ledger’s embodiment of the Joker, which I consider one of perhaps the ten greatest performances ever committed to celluloid, but by the knowledge that its tragic star burned his essence, including his chaos, pain and primal scream, into the role. The Dark Knight Rises is burdened only by the genius of its predecessor. To be fair, Warner Brothers did a similar launch in December 2007, launching the preview seven months before that mercurial film opened to a rapturous response the following summer.

And how was tonight’s screening? Can we expect to be disappointed? Is this purely a marketing tool or is it a legitimate way to gauge fanboy feedback? (Mild spoilers after the jump.)