Post by joekiddlouischama on Jan 24, 2020 5:18:41 GMT
Jan 9, 2020 15:03:04 GMT @rascallion said:
I too deem Little Women "lousy." Choking in sentiment, thanks in part to an overly loud, too-frequently-played, Golden Globe-nominated orchestral score by Alexandre Desplat, Little Women attempts to blend drama and comedy and succeeds as neither. Based on Lady Bird (2017), the merely decent, severely overrated coming-of-age comedy, and now Little Women, writer-director Greta Gerwig possesses a tendency to "soft-peddle" matters. As I noted in this post from December 17, 2017, Lady Bird tried to be cutesy yet ironic at the same time, and the mix proved a bit clumsy.
link
In Little Women, meanwhile, Gerwig takes ostensibly dramatic material and "soft-peddles" it to the point where the movie essentially becomes a comedy. The problem is that I never once found the film funny—the jokes proved too obvious, trite, and easy to see in advance. (Granted, many audience members laughed; I just was not one of them.)
So as a comedy, Little Women does not work in my opinion. What is left, then, is a breezy, fluffy film that even comes across as flippant and frivolous, despite the strength of the source material (Louisa May Alcott's famous novel). For instance, in the scene where Amy
falls through the ice and needs to be rescued,
I knew—from the score and the tone—that she of course would survive. As comedy, the joke is too obvious and blunt. And as drama, Gerwig saps the scene of suspense and thus any dramatic power. The viewer is hence left with something approaching flotsam and frivolity. Little Women does contain a few stronger, weightier, more seriously dramatic scenes (for instance, when Jo meets with the publisher at the beginning and again at the end, and when she questions how the young editor knows anything about writing after he admits that he does not write, and when Jo confronts Amy about what the latter has done with Jo's manuscripts). But those scenes are few and far between, the overall mood is too mushy, and the tone definitely wobbles at some critical junctures. For instance, in the scene where Jo—having previously rejected Laurie—now seeks his hand in marriage, Gerwig turns a pivotal dramatic scene into a joke about being called "my Lord." The point is not that the film descends into slapstick, but that Gerwig fails to blend drama and comedy effectively and instead undermines both possibilities. Mostly, the mix meant that I just could not care (and the same seems true for Nora). Saorise Ronan is solid as Jo, and reshaping the material to focus more on her story and less on everyone else's could have made for a sharper, fresher adaptation. And the film is nice enough visually—I have no issues with Gerwig in that regard—yet not to the point of redeeming this syrupy blandness. And she also makes the curious decision at one point to introduce a nightmarish dream sequence in the middle of the movie, as if she wanted to show some artistic acumen in the midst of this utterly banal would-be crowd pleaser. One way or the other, Little Women is truly a forgettable film.
Sometimes, trying to understand why a film does not work—or does not work optimally—can be a reason to see it.