Little Women Review

The March household is lit mostly by fire and window, and Geoffrey Simpson shoots the interiors so that faces keep sliding in and out of warm shadow, which does more for the texture of Alcott than any amount of period bric a brac could. Winona Ryder's Jo is all forward motion, chin first, physically restless in a way that makes her later stillness land. Kirsten Dunst walks off with the first half as young Amy, vain and quick and genuinely funny, and the handover to Samantha Mathis is the film's structural wound, since the two are plainly playing different people.

Claire Danes underplays Beth, which is the right instinct, and the moment Mr. Laurence gives her the piano that belonged to his own dead daughter is the one time the picture earns its tears without pushing for them. Christian Bale gives Laurie a loose eagerness that curdles convincingly into hurt. Then the back half compresses badly. Gabriel Byrne's Bhaer arrives as a solution rather than a man, and Thomas Newman's score works overtime to sell a romance the screenplay has barely built. Susan Sarandon's Marmee is saddled with a modernised and faintly lecturing line on corsets and girls' education that the film keeps circling back to, as though it does not trust the book to speak for itself.