Stars: Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Timothee Chalamet, Meryl Streep
Director: Greta Gerwig
Oscar History: 6 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Actress-Saoirse Ronan, Supporting Actress-Florence Pugh, Costume Design*, Score, Adapted Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars
(Spoilers Ahead) The film is not told in the traditional more linear fashion that past versions (and the novel) were told. Instead, it jumps straight to the middle, and we get an array of flashbacks into the lives of the four March sisters. We see Amy (Pugh) already in Paris with Aunt March (Streep), trying to pursue Laurie (Chalamet) after he's just been rejected by her sister Jo (Ronan), who is off trying to become a successful writer. Meanwhile, Meg (Watson) is back home struggling to find a way to make ends meet with her poor husband, and we soon learn that she once had the opportunity to have a far wealthier end to her story. And of course there's sweet, piano-playing Beth (Scanlen) off in the corner getting deathly sick. Told back-and-forth, the film gives us backgrounds about these young women, as well as an indication of where they're going.
As I'm not familiar with the story, I was, while not confused, a bit perplexed. Gerwig's film is clearly meant to be a companion piece to someone who is already a fan of this tale, not simply a "stand alone" story as if it's treated as such, it's kind of messy. The film is charming, no doubt, and has enough of the original tale to make sense, but it has less impact when you are halfway to realizing Amy will marry Laurie and not Jo since that's the opening scenes for those characters, or that you have a strong indication that Beth is about to die from the film's beginning. I am a firm believer that you shouldn't have to read the book to understand and enjoy the movie (they need to exist on different plains), so I am going to fault Gerwig's film a bit here even though others will claim this is totally acceptable. As it is, the film is good, but it's not great, and that's because it feels kind of jumbled and without enough narrative stakes for the audience as written.
That said, she assembled an amazing cast and a slew of actors that likely saw Lady Bird and were willing to sign up for anything that Gerwig was willing to do after that. Chalamet is sexy & spoiled as Laurie, but one has to assume that this is a character that feels pretty dismissible for fans of earlier iterations of the picture as you can't really root for such a man. He re-teams here with his Lady Bird costar Saoirse Ronan, who plays Jo as an ardent feminist, someone who is more concerned to be what she said she's always wanted to be than, as the film progresses, who she might secretly wish to be. The scene toward the end where she realizes that she might have made it work with Laurie is devastating, but I don't think Ronan does enough groundwork to make the rest of her character stick. This is in contrast to Florence Pugh, who kind of steals the picture from the cavalcade of Oscar nominees as Amy. She gives a character that could be easily discarded a verve and passion that you wouldn't expect, and along with Midsommar, shows that she's an actress that has arrived in 2019.
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