![]() ![]() Times are hard, although it's hard not to smile when we find out how hard: "Firewood and lamp oil were scarce," we hear, while seeing the Marches living in what passes for poverty: a three-story colonial, decorated for a Currier and Ives print, with the cheerful family cook in the kitchen and the Marches sitting around the fire, knitting sweaters and rolling bandages. The March family is on its own their father has gone off to war. The story is set in Concord, Mass., and begins in 1862, in a winter when all news is dominated by the Civil War. It's a film about how all of life seems to stretch ahead of us when we're young, and how, through a series of choices, we narrow our destiny. "Little Women" may be marketed for children and teenagers, but my hunch is it will be best appreciated by their parents. Of course, I was 11 or 12 then, but the novel seems to have grown up in the meantime - or maybe director Gillian Armstrong finds the serious themes and refuses to simplify the story into a "family" formula. The very title summons up preconceptions of treacly do-gooders in a smarmy children's story, and some of the early shots in "Little Women" do little to discourage them: In one of the first frames, the four little women and their mother manage to arrange their heads within the frame with all of the spontaneity of a Kodak ad.īut this is movie is not smarmy, not dogooding, and only a little treacly before long I was beginning to remember, from many years ago, that Louisa May Alcott's Little Women was a really good novel - one that I read with great attention. ![]()
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