Little Women Review

Gerwig's real intervention is structural: she cuts the novel's two halves against each other so that every childhood scene is remembered from inside an adult disappointment, and the same rooms return first in warm gold and later in cold blue. Yorick Le Saux's two palettes do the work a voiceover would have ruined. Saoirse Ronan plays Jo as elbows and appetite, and her speech about women having minds and souls as well as hearts is delivered as an argument she is losing with herself.

Florence Pugh supplies the biggest upgrade, handing the least popular March sister an economic case for her choices that the book leaves implicit. Laura Dern and Chris Cooper are quietly excellent, and Timothée Chalamet's Laurie convinces far more as a friend than as a suitor. Alexandre Desplat's score never oversells a moment. The ending, which lets Jo negotiate her own book's marriage plot with a publisher while the wedding plays as fiction, is a clever solution that some will find too clever. We think the shuffling occasionally strands the minor characters. It remains the best version this novel has had.