Looking for a new film to spice up your rotation this holiday season? Consider watching — or rewatching — the 1994 version of “Little Women,” starring Susan Sarandon, Winona Ryder, Claire Danes and Kirsten Dunst. The movie is turning 30 this month, but it holds up exceptionally well.
Here are two reasons why you should devote a movie night to this modern classic.
First, there is no work of literature that depicts female character formation quite as compellingly as Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel. And the 1994 film, directed by Gillian Armstrong, stays true to the spirit of this classic book about four sisters growing up in New England during the Civil War. Second, the film packs a punch independent of the novel, by emphasizing that living well means centering others. It hits, in a much softer way, the same note of Christmas spirit as many an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ 1843 novella “A Christmas Carol.” (And incidentally, Alcott also incorporates a lot of Dickens into “Little Women.”)
In the book, Alcott portrays the four March sisters — who are loosely based on herself (as protagonist Jo) and her own three sisters — as full of both virtues that merit cultivation and flaws that require self-mastery. The story begins with the girls ranging in age from from 11 to 16; it ends when they are in their late 20s and early 30s.
The March girls, especially Jo, walk a road to adulthood that is full of unremitting work, interpersonal conflict, self-sacrifice and hard-won self-knowledge. Their characters are rich and nuanced, not flighty or two-dimensional. Marriage is valued and endorsed by the book. But Alcott’s story is not a series of shallow marriage plots. It presents, instead, a series of formational journeys, each of which includes a companionate marriage. This holistic focus on women’s multi-dimensionality sets “Little Women” apart from other 19th-century American stories by and about women, many of which were beholden to a tearily sentimental, religiously didactic and romantically reductionist understanding of female life.
The 1994 movie works this nuanced richness into nearly every scene, most of which are pulled directly from the novel. In addition to Winona Ryder’s energetic yet appropriately aloof Jo, Susan Sarandon’s Marmee is the distilled essence of a beloved character whose whole is more than the sum of her parts.
Other film adaptations of “Little Women” have either undershot or overshot this mark. In the 1933 adaptation, Katharine Hepburn’s Jo is too “shouty.” She captures the fun-loving, boisterous, tomboyish nature of the book’s central character, but fails to channel her moody, sullen side as Jo transforms from a girl with gumption to a woman with gravitas. In part, this is because the film as a whole does not really get at the interiority of anyone.
The 1949 version, in which Elizabeth Taylor portrays the “flower of the family,” youngest sister Amy, is the worst of the traditional feature-length adaptations, devolving into exactly the kind of shallow, feel-good, sentimentalism that Alcott deplored, and in opposition to which she wrote “Little Women.”
In addition to several miniseries of varying quality produced over the years, there is also Greta Gerwig’s 2019 feature-length adaptation. As I wrote when the film was released, despite a tremendous performance by Saoirse Ronan, whose Jo is perhaps the most intricate and accurate of all, this postmodern version makes a cringeworthy anachronism of Alcott’s critique of 19th century norms of femininity. Toward the end of the film, Jo delivers lines that sound cribbed from 21st century Women’s Studies 101 — in deference to how scholars have interpreted the novel rather than its actual text and spirit. This flawed ideological lens makes an otherwise excellent film shrill in the places where the plot demands understatement.
So, all in all, only the 30-year-old film can be watched again and again. And again.
In the 1994 adaptation, overlayed on the central plot of character development is a warm, idealized, familial glow. This quality is indispensable and unquantifiable. In short, it’s the kind of movie that makes you want to reach for a blanket and tea, even if you typically don’t like blankets and aren’t a tea drinker. This is what makes it a movie that stands alone, independent of the book. It’s also what makes it the closest, of the many film adaptations, to capturing the heart of Alcott’s novel. And, by extension, to capturing the other-regarding, self-sacrificial heart of a Dickensian understanding of Christmas.
Which is, not coincidentally, where both the novel and the film begin — fire ablaze and holiday decorations on display. And where watching it might just as well begin too.
Break out the blankets.
Elizabeth Grace Matthew is a regular contributor for The Hill. She writes about books, education and culture, including on Substack.