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?

When Marty Met Edie: The Age of Innocence (A Modern Film Classic)

In 1993, Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese, famed for his violent crime dramas and character studies such as Raging Bull, GoodFellas and Cape Fear, did the unthinkable: he released a PG-rated costume drama where no blood is spilled and no obscenities are uttered. Based on Edith Wharton’s landmark work of American literature, and still one of the single greatest novels in history, The Age of Innocence was a dissection of old New York society in the 1870s. Having been introduced to Scorsese via his controversial maelstrom The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988, the Blogger was as surprised as many in the industry that Scorsese would have chosen a seemingly genteel period piece, with plenty of corsets but nary a pistol in sight. 

What Scorsese saw in Wharton’s seminal work was apparent to those familiar with the original novel. The old way of doing battle in polite, moneyed society was not through duels and fisticuffs, but through the most powerful weapon of all: words. Wharton’s chronicle of a love triangle and its shattering effect on one man’s happiness, due to social constraint and circumstance, critiqued the old New York society in which she grew up with a knife’s edge. This was a place where the weapon of choice was good old-fashioned gossip. War was waged in salons, country homes, ballrooms and studies. It’s no wonder Scorsese was drawn to the project, because the battlefield was fraught with completely invisible landmines.

Day-Lewis and Ryder, as
Newland Archer and May Welland

The triangle consists of well-to-do Manhattan lawyer Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis in the film). He is engaged to the prim and proper, but never distant, May Welland (Winona Ryder). Their forthcoming marriage would align two of New York’s most powerful and respected families. In other words, it was not so much a wedding as a power-brokered M&A. Into this world comes May’s black sheep cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), an unconventional sort who wore black satin to her coming-out ball, married Polish nobility, and has returned to America to flee her flailing marriage. Humiliated and going through the painful motions of divorce, she is welcomed back to the fold and into society, but beneath everyone’s veneer lurks something more sinister. Countess Olenska is the subject of endless gossip and the speculation surrounding the true circumstances of her marriage’s collapse becomes the talk of the town. Newland, like a lawyer, welcomes challenges to conformity and explores them, and becomes irresistibly drawn to her. He handles her divorce proceedings while keeping his own feelings barely constrained. Rather alarmingly but discreetly, he crosses several professional boundaries by declaring his love for the Countess and she confesses to the same. The seemingly innocent May might have noticed all this going on and, if she suspects anything, she doesn’t let on easily. Wharton intended the title of her novel to be ironic, as there is nothing innocent about the comings and goings of this precariously balanced world in that day and age.