Don’t get me wrong. I, like the next (then) high school girl, did consecutive gleeful cartwheels upon seeing Timothée Chalamet cast as the love interest in Little Women (2019). As someone who rereads the 1868 novel Little Women by Louisa May Alcott yearly and claimed it as a favorite book of all time at age eleven, the mere idea of a shiny new film filled me with excitement.
The potential was there. I trusted director Greta Gerwig to skillfully construct the world I had spent many days imagining. Although not quite representative of the people the book describes, the actors were brimming with talent. Saoirse Ronan takes the role of the protagonist, Jo March. Timothée Chalamet is her love interest, Laurie, and Emma Watson and Florence Pugh, best actress list frequents, are her sisters.
But then again, Saoirse Ronan is no Jo March. She doesn’t look the part. The character’s “one beauty”, her untamed, rolling, deep-brown locks, advertised as power-giving like the biblical Samson, are absent. Marmee, played by Laura Dern, is not hard-working because she is good-hearted; Gerwig says she is angry and uses charitable work to lessen her rage.
The oldest sister Meg (Emma Watson) and middle child Beth (Eliza Scalen) are refused much screen time, though they are major planets in the universe of Little Women. Finally, although restructured by Gerwig to make a larger statement, Jo’s romance with her future husband is bandaged together, in a scene or two.
In general, the choices feel unfounded.
However, Gerwig was careful to consider Alcott’s intentions left outside the book. Where the book left questions, history from Alcott’s life, like her hesitancy to marry Jo off at all, filled in the gap. The movie shows the pressure felt by many female authors in the 1800s and 1900s to make sure books ended with the marriage of any heroine. Alcott, if she was not prevented by publishers, would have happily left Jo unmarried.
So while the movie denies the textual ending, it gains awareness and legitimacy by citing the context- the unsaid.
Still, as a book fan, I cannot help but defend the novel’s autonomy and claim as the original and believe it to be unable to be improved upon, even by an admittedly dreamy Timothée Chalamet. A question has to be raised, how far can adaptations go? Every director seems to have the right to take 90% of someone else’s work (in this case, Alcott’s) and add their spin on it. It feels slightly like plagiarism. Any book fans, from Jane Austen supporters to Jenny Han fangirls can contest. Walking away from film adaptations can leave you feeling robbed.
This problem, if it can be truly identified as one, will remain unsolved and always grating. In the meantime, I can only encourage you to look past Timothée Chalamet and into the book that inspired the movie you’re watching so you can share in my anger.