![]() This new adaptation cleaves closely to the original text with thoughtful and deliberate additions and changes. And Jo, played by Maya Hawke, is tumultuous, impetuous, full of ambition and passion, searching, confused, and certain all at once. Laurie (Jonah Hauer-King) and Professor Bhaer (Mark Stanley) are perfect opposites, as it should be. Marmee and Father March, played by Emily Watson and Dylan Baker, ably portray the many joys and heartbreaks of marriage and parenthood. ![]() Amy (Kathryn Newton) is coquettish and fond of fine things, but also fiery and self-confident. Beth (Annes Elwes) is sweet but genuinely troubled by anxiety, ever conscious of her timidity compared to her powerful sisters. Meg (Willa Fitzgerald) is rosy and well-mannered as well as feisty. Angela Lansbury’s Aunt March is, unsurprisingly, perfection. The sisters and their personalities are so well known that they could easily become one dimensional, but instead the actors elevate the characters. The actors fill out the characters, not changing their well-known traits but rather fleshing them out. In this way, the film subtly but beautifully tells us that the family is changed - their lives punctuated by darkness - but that the sun is still there. When the scene cuts to an outdoor view of the clothesline, the sun glares, but a shot of the sky is broken by the flapping black fabric of mourning clothes out to dry. When Beth breathes her last, her death bed is draped in white linens to show the sacredness of the space for Victorian Americans. Scenes are made more powerful with artful use of light and color. (My husband did quibble with one oddly shaped Union uniform, but the dresses!) The costuming will leave historical fashion aficionados squealing with glee. The viewer can nearly smell the wood smoke in winter scenes, and feel the warmth of the sun in others. The March family home is warm and comforting, rich with bits of material history that make it feel realistic. The Masterpiece version is warm and sweet, but also takes the story of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy seriously. Would a new telling of Little Women try to add grit to appeal to modern audiences? Scene from Little Women (&c PBS) How would I picture Laurie as anyone but the lovely, moody Christian Bale, or Jo as anyone but Winona Ryder? I also worried because recent updates of my other favorite girlhood book, Anne of Green Gables, have either been sickly sweet or jarringly dark. I grew up with the 1994 adaptation and was a little wary of another version. Naturally, I was excited - and nervous - when I heard about the new Masterpiece adaptation of the classic book. Like my mother, I now have different editions of Little Women laying around my house like little touchstones to the past. Years later, when the man who would become my husband bought me a copy at a flea market, I started collecting different versions. It was the subject of a photography project I entered in the county fair I used it as a prop in my senior pictures. As a dreamy bookworm with a love of the past, the book became something of a fixture for me. It was pleasantly heavy, and its rounded cover had embossed vines and flowers on the cover. Growing up, my mother kept a 19th-century copy of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women on a table in my parents’ bedroom. ![]() Spoilers ahead for plot points of Little Women - but you’ve had 150 years to read the book! ![]()
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