This Is ‘Little Women’ for a New Era

So is it any surprise that Gerwig’s “Little Women,” at the end of a decade in which we confronted female power in a whole new way, feels positively radical?

It still has the cozy fireplace scenes and the long dresses. But the characters question social mores (“I’m sick of being told that love is all a woman is fit for,” says Jo, played by Saoirse Ronan), deliver critical context about the structural barriers limiting women (the economics of marriage, for instance, in which a woman’s earnings became property of her husband) and are at times flat-out angry at a world that, as the book puts it, in the words of the youngest character, Amy, “is hard on ambitious girls.” (It still is.)

“I think ‘Little Women’ is always a secretly subversive story,” Amy Pascal, a producer on the film, said in an interview.

“Little Women” tells the story of the four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, who live in Concord, Mass., during and after the Civil War. Depending on whom you ask (and when), it is a girls’ coming-of-age narrative, a New England family saga, a war story, a love story, a heartwarming Christmas tale, or a feminist text about women’s choices (or lack thereof).

In Gerwig’s version, which opened on Christmas Day, it is also the story of Alcott, perhaps the real heroine of the Marches, who never married (“I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe,” she said), built a fortune on the “Little Women” books, and on whose life and letters Gerwig said she relied upon as a guide.