Little Women is an exquisite exploration of family, growing up

Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet in Little Women. Image courtesy Columbia Pictures.

Little Women is simply extraordinary. It's riveting and enchanting, sweet and bittersweet, buoyed by an incredible level of brilliance in nearly every facet. The film is far too good to be described as simple comfort film – it's much too intricate for that – yet it is comforting to watch a film as exquisite and charming as this. 

Based on the eponymous novel by Louisa May Alcott, Little Women centers on the March sisters over the course of seven years in the 1860s. Jo (Saoirse Ronan) is an aspiring writer living in a tiny apartment in New York City. Oldest sister Meg (Emma Watson) is a married mother of two with dreams of wealth and comfort. Amy (Florence Pugh) lives with Aunt March (Meryl Streep) in Paris and wants to marry into wealth to support her family. Beth (Eliza Scanlen) is at home in Concord, Massachusetts with matriarch Marmee (Laura Dern), living a quiet life while fighting against an unspecified condition. The March sisters find a friend in their whimsical neighbor Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) and a patron in Laurie's grandfather (Chris Cooper) as they grow up through times hard and good.

Little Women is a fundamentally excellent film; everything in this film works, and it works to a brilliant degree. There are no glaring flaws with the writing, directing, acting, cinematography, editing, or soundtrack. Every emotional beat is struck with the perfect amount of force to wring out the desired effect. Writer/director Greta Gerwig has created a film that is legitimately outstanding, building upon the existing material to create a lovely, relatable story of family and growing up. 

   

The main drama in Little Women is rooted in the difficulties of both, shown through quotidian anecdotes from the March sisters' childhoods. A day at the beach is nearly as memorable as Amy burning Jo's novel or Meg's wedding to the kind John Brooke (James Norton), with each moment adding more layers to the March family dynamic. All of these small moments in the March women's lives build up to a remarkable portrait of sisters navigating into the confusing world of adulthood, reconsidering their youthful ambitions. The March sisters all have dreams of becoming an artist – whether it be a writer, musician, actor, or painter – that either fall apart or come close to doing so. The film isn't about settling for something short of your dreams; rather, the characters look within themselves to find what matters to them and who they want to be. Amy, Jo, and Meg all go through this process of self reflection and come out of it knowing their course as they establish themselves as adults. 

There's nothing overly complex about the film's storytelling, but Gerwig does something quite clever by jumping between the past and the film's present without clear demarcations. Little Women might start a story in Paris and quickly jump back to Concord to link that specific moment with a memory. Aside from linking the past and present directly, this adds a little verisimilitude to the storytelling. Memories can pop out of nowhere with little provocation, so the film doing the same feels true to life and serves as a subtle method of drawing a closer connection with the March sisters. The audience is living life through the eyes of the family, adding to the weight of the hard times and the joy of the good times. If done poorly, this could alienate the audience by confusing them, but Gerwig handles this beautifully. She shows a talent for guiding multiple narratives and has faith in her storytelling to keep the audience invested despite the frequent time skips.

What's most endearing about Little Women is the decency coursing through this film. There is so much kindness and caring shown by the main characters its impossible to avoid investment in the lives of the March family. Every character has a few flaws to keep them human, yet the flaws never overshadow how much everyone cares for one another. Gerwig doesn't force her characters to do the right things at all times, yet they care enough to feel contrition for their actions and use that to grow into more mature, kinder people. Jo and Amy have the most turbulent relationship of the four sisters, but the film ends with them respecting each other for their wisdom and talents, along with forgiveness for transgressions fueled by immaturity. Adulthood can have that affect on families – the squabbles of the past become less and less important as siblings grow up and find perspective – and Little Women shows how captivating growing up can be.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 134 minutes

Genre: Drama

tl;dr

What Worked: Writing, Directing, Acting, Storytelling

What Fell Short: A bit of drag in the third act

What To Watch As Well: Atonement, Frances Ha

Holy Cats! This Broadway adaptation terrible!

Francesca Hayward and Robbie Fairchild in Cats. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

Reason and sanity are not things to be found in Cats. Rather, the loopy, unfortunately and mildly enchanting Broadway adaptation is all things and no things at once. Somehow, despite a brilliant lack of cohesion or basic plot logic, this film drew a bunch of famous folks – Idris Elba! Taylor Swift! Judi Dench! Jason Derulo! – to lend an air of respectability to the lunacy. Perhaps I'm missing something indelible about a show that ran for many, many years on Broadway. Or maybe the film adaptation is the fever dream of ego-driven idiots.

 

I think Cats is about a talent show in which the winner is reincarnated or something along those lines. Aside from the stars mentioned above are Jennifer Hudson, Ray Winstone, Ian McKellen, Rebel Wilson, and James Corden. Ballerina Francesca Hayward serves as the audience surrogate exploring what tries to be a mystical world of feline majesty. Everyone is dressed like a cat, they have weird cat names and do quasi cat things that are far sillier than ever intended. There are many songs tossed in because this is a musical, including a song Swift sings that is well outside her capabilities. Then everything ends on a rather banal shot meant to mean something important to director Tom Hooper and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Cats is an audacious calamity, wrong on almost every front and on nearly every level. Sometimes the film is bizarre and accidentally enchanting, littered with impeccable scenery devouring by Elba, McKellen, and Wilson. It tries to hit so many tones and have so many layers it misses all of them, dashing through emotions at unimaginable speeds and with no control. Cats is madness with a $90 million budget and a director with no clue what to do with it, the perfect recipe for an expensive cluster best viewed on hallucinogens.

With two hours of screen time to fill though Cats can't keep the insanity rolling. It's in those moments where the film's legitimate incompetence comes to light, bringing the terrible fun to a frustrating halt. Like the CGI, which looks dreadful and incomplete, as if they gave up about three quarters of the way in. Hooper fails wildly staging the musical numbers, most notably in the two renditions of Memory. This is the showcase song, and the film has the very experienced Hudson on hand to sing it. This should be the easiest win for this film, but it ends up completely mucking the whole thing up. The emotions wrought from the song land with a thud, due to a mix of Hooper failing to establish the right tone, strange choreography choices in the second version, and general framing and editing flaws that fail to convey the song's melancholy. Hudson is game and tries her best, but it's hard to succeed when everything around you is en fuego as it is in Cats.

If any one thing kept this film going though, it was the audience at the screening I attended. I've never sat with an audience as splendidly sincere and sarcastic as the one who soldiered through Cats with me. Every little cat pun or dumb, awkward cat movement garnered a wicked groan or one of those “I cannot believe this is happening” laughs. Some folks applauded after a few of the musical numbers – Memory was not one of them – because somehow applause is the only acceptable way to appreciate insanity, even if no one behind it is around to hear it. It was a hoot to watch it with folks, a shared experience that will be difficult to replicate in the future. Too bad this five-star audience had to sit through a one-star film. 

Review: One out of Five Stars  

Click here to see the trailer. 

Rating: PG

Run time: 110 minutes

Genre: Musical 

tl;dr  

What Worked: Audience 

What Fell Short: Everything Else 

What To Watch Instead: Singing in the Rain, Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Richard Jewell a deep character study undermined by politics

Sam Rockwell and Paul Walter Hauser in Richard Jewell. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

What's worrisome about Richard Jewell is how far down the rabbit hole director Clint Eastwood fell. The numerous splendid moments of filmmaking and the brilliance of the dive into the film's central figure is nearly overlapped by a pervading sense of paranoia from the director about bureaucracy conspiring against an average white man. This is Eastwood's millstone, an inability to see the humanity driving the institutions he fears.

Richard Jewell stars Paul Walter Hauser as the eponymous security guard, an unremarkable man who saves hundreds of lives after discovering a bomb at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Despite the act of courage, Jewell's grandiose dreams and odd past behavior draw the attention of FBI agent Tom Shaw (Jon Hamm), who suspects Jewell planted the bomb himself to become famous. Shaw leaks the investigation to tenacious reporter Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde), which instantly turns Jewell from a hero to a villain. With the help of attorney Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell) and his mother Bobbi (Kathy Bates), Jewell fights against the forces opposing him to clear his name.

Eastwood and screenwriter Billy Ray dive incredibly deep into its central character to reveal a man whose shining moment of competence nearly ruins his life. Underneath the hushed voice and abundances of “sirs” is a man with a healthy ego and aspirations for mild greatness as a law enforcement official. Jewell is a legitimate hero who saved multiple lives, but Richard Jewell isn't afraid to show the human side – especially the ego – pushing that heroism. In an era defined by heroes who are so far above human realism they are barely relatable, it is pleasant to see a man's flaws result in an act of courage. To paraphrase an Emerson quote, the difference between a hero and ordinary folk is five minutes of courage, and the film mines a lot from that idea.

The humanity Eastwood and Ray provide for Jewell are not afforded to the forces opposing him. The battle in Richard Jewell is the fight between a decent guy and powerful institutions – government and the media – out to ruin his life, but the humans representing those forces come across as cartoonish in comparison. Shaw's motivations are flat and uninvestigated, his presence more stereotypical than nuanced. The film's portrayal of Scruggs, whose name was not changed for this film, is far more concerning. She's not only depicted not simply as a woman who is willing to sleep with a source for information, but a terrible journalist and even worse human being, celebrating the deaths of innocent people to advance her career. And despite the film's take on her reporting, her article was correct and had additional sourcing the film implies did not exist. 

Neither Shaw nor Scruggs should be a villain in this film. They were two people doing their jobs in the aftermath of incredible act of violence and terror, consumed by a need to rush for truth and information. They were human, yet Eastwood and Ray cannot find that humanity. This is becoming a trend for Eastwood, who took a similar approach with Sully. In both film, the actions of the main characters are impugned by governmental investigation to the point the terror of the initial actions are overshadowed by the bureaucracy. Even if the case against Richard Jewell was untrue, the idea the government overstepped by conducting an investigation is ludicrous. Yet this is the worldview Eastwood presents in Richard Jewell, a fever dream in which good white men are persecuted for their good deeds. These ideas permeate so deep into this film it overshadows some stellar filmmaking. The sequence when Jewell first finds the bomb through the inevitable explosion is filled with brilliant tension worthy of Hitchcock. Eastwood plays with the audience's knowledge that the bomb will go off, throwing in some hints of a timeline to mess with perspective and keep the actual moment of detonation a shock to viewers. That moment should be the film's centerpiece, yet Eastwood gets so lost in the ensuing legal issues the power of that moment becomes window dressing. Richard Jewell is a good film, but Eastwood pursuit of victimhood prevents his film from becoming anything more than that.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 129 minutes

Genre: Drama

tl;dr

What Worked: Richard Jewell, Paul Walter Hauser

What Fell Short: Secondary Characters, Politics, Lazy Foreshadowing

What To Watch As Well: Shattered Glass