My holiday favourites have changed over the years but there are some films I’ve seen so many times that I’ve lost track, including It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol—the 1951 adaptation starring Alastair Sim—and The Sound of Music. However, writer-director Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel, Little Women, has surpassed these classics as my new favourite because it seems tailor-made to delight the female audience.

If there’s one movie that should be on every woman’s Christmas watch list, it’s Little Women.

Most of us are familiar with the popular story about the four March sisters: Jo, Meg, Amy and Beth, growing up together and coming of age in New England in the 1860s while their father is off fighting in the Civil War. Alcott’s 1868 novel inspired several screen adaptations, with Jo March being variously played by Katharine Hepburn (1933), June Allyson (1949, Elizabeth Taylor played Amy), Winona Ryder (1994), etc. In Gerwig’s wonderfully enjoyable screenplay, Jo is played by Saoirse Ronan (Mary Queen of Scots, Lady Bird, Brooklyn).

Ronan’s co-stars, Jo’s sisters, are played by Emma Watson (Meg), Florence Pugh (Amy) and Eliza Scanlen (Beth). Laura Dern (Jurassic Park) plays their mother, Marmee, and Meryl Streep plays their Aunt March.

To appreciate how much more Little Women has to offer female viewers than other popular, relatively recent Christmas movies—think Home Alone and Elf—one needs only consider Little Women’s inclusions. Over and above the female protagonist (Jo, the aspiring writer), are several significant female characters. Women speak throughout. It includes congeniality, affection (25 hugs!) and supportiveness between women, as well as positive mother/daughter relationships and close relationships between sisters.

Moreover, the female characters are generously dressed in many layers and long wool socks, scarves, mittens and hats. The sexualization of women that is a problem in most movies isn’t here. Parenthetically, in Elf the lead female appears in a shower, and in Home Alone Macaulay Culkin holds up a Playboy magazine.

As for the cherries on top, Little Women includes a female gaze, a critical look at sexism and focus on both women’s need to earn money and barriers to their earning income.

There’s even a small focus on the environment: Jo says, “We could never have loved the Earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.”

This adaptation also appeals to our natural love of food through its scrumptious-looking cakes and other desserts, on one fine Christmas morning in particular thanks to the generosity of the March sisters’ wealthy old neighbour (grandfather to Laurie, played by Timothée Chalamet).

Gerwig’s rich, brilliant production is set in Massachusetts, where the girls grow up and befriend the boy next door, Laurie, and New York City, where Jo becomes a published writer. There are  also a few scenes set in Paris when Aunt March takes Amy on her last trip to Europe. The pacing is good, and Gerwig provides much to entertain us.

Over the Holidays, when the weather outside is frightful—and if you’ve no place to go—have some corn for popping, turn the lights way down low and treat yourself to the enjoyable Christmas movie that may not be on any man’s watch list but should definitely make yours: Little Women.

Little Women is rated PG and has a running time of 135 minutes. The Pascal Pictures production was released in 2019.

Alline Cormier
Film analyst

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