My Favorite Adaptations: Little Women

So, a few years ago when Batman Begins came out, I felt myself getting filled with giddy excitement about it, like, all the time.  One day I just had to ask myself, "Self, why do you love Christian Bale so much?" A moment of contemplation revealed the answer: Little Women.  When I was younger, I loved this movie so much, especially Bale's Laurie.  I still haven't ever seen Empire of the Sun or American Psycho, but Little Women has earned him an enduring place in my heart.  Beyond elementary-school-era crushes, the truly great thing about Little Women is that as I've grown older and plowed through Louisa May Alcott's classic read a few times the film has only grown in my esteem.

What this film version, adapted by Robin Swicord, does that others don't is place the Marches in their historical milieu and flesh them out into real people.  Watching the March sisters pass an injured soldier in the street brings the Civil-War-era setting of the story home in a way that the knowledge of their absent father, away at war, simply doesn't.  The performances breathe life into characters that have been re-imagined and re-embodied enough times to seem rote.  Claire Danes in particular gives a three-dimensionality to Beth, a character who basically exists to be tragic, that makes predecessors seem especially shallow and treacly.  Additionally, like the later Pulitzer Prize-winning novel March by Geraldine Brooks, Little Women conflates the Alcotts with the Marches, bringing in some of their Transcendentalist philosophy and making Marmee a tough proto-feminist.  In this version of Little Women, the Marches and their companions don't just come off of the page, they live.  Nearly fifteen years after its release, I will still drop everything to sit and watch this movie.