'Little Women' review: It's set in the 21st century, but stuck in the 1800s
Sarah Davenport, left, is Jo, Allie Jennings is Beth, Taylor Murphy is Amy and Melanie Stone is Meg in the modern-day retelling of "Little Women." Credit: Pinnacle Peak Pictures
PLOT Louisa May Alcott's classic of four sisters gets updated from the Civil War to 2018.
CAST Sarah Davenport, Lea Thompson, Lucas Grabeel, Melanie Stone
RATED PG-13 (some thematic elements, teenage drinking)
LENGTH 1:52
BOTTOM LINE Despite the modern setting, it feels very old-fashioned.
“Little Women,” Louisa May Alcott’s tale of sisterhood and hardship, is a much beloved story embraced by filmmakers in three previous big-screen efforts — not to mention several TV versions.
Now from writer-director Clare Niederpruem and faith-based movie purveyor Pureflix comes the first feature-film adaptation set in the present day. While it seems like a fun idea to update the trials and travails of the March sisters, dragging the story into the 21st century shows just how of its era “Little Women” truly is. When was the last time you heard of a girl selling her hair for money?
That’s one of the most indelible moments of the fiery Jo March, played here with vim and vigor by Sarah Davenport. Watching Jo intellectually tussle with men and boss around her younger sisters, all in the name of her individuality and dedication to the creative life as a writer, you can’t help but realize, in the harsh light of modernity, that Jo truly is a toxic individual.
The film dutifully replicates story beats from the novel and brings Civil War-era gender politics to the story of five unruly and highly educated women. They might talk about cellphones and Google, but there’s something distinctly retrograde about the way the women function in the world.
Lea Thompson is lovely as the warm and wise Marmee, and all the performers are suitably allocated to their personae — though as Jo, Davenport steamrolls everyone else on screen
To update the story of a group of women in 19th century Massachusetts struggling to get by while the man of the house is away at war, the whole thing needs an overhaul, taking into account the women’s movement and the cultural shifts in class, labor and communities that make our world so very different from mid-19th century Massachusetts. Does Marmee even have a job? Those contextual cultural shifts have a huge impact on the story beats of “Little Women,” which is very much of its time, and this adaptation completely bungles the update.
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