Little Women (Greta Gerwig, 2019)

Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, and Eliza Scanlen in Little Women

Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet, Meryl Streep, Tracy Letts, Bob Odenkirk, James Norton, Chris Cooper, Louis Garrel, Jayne Houdyshell. Screenplay: Greta Gerwig, based on a novel by Louisa May Alcott. Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux. Production design: Jess Gonchor. Film editing: Nick Houy. Music: Alexandre Desplat. 

I didn't read Little Women as a child: Boys didn't read "girls' books" back then. And when I finally read it -- out loud, to my daughter -- I found it a little stiff and starchy. But it has made for some very good movies, particularly the 1933 Katharine Hepburn version directed by George Cukor and the 1994 Winona Ryder version directed by Gillian Armstrong. Somehow, I don't think we'll be calling this 2019 film the Soirse Ronan version, but rather the Greta Gerwig version. As writer and director, Gerwig has developed a complete and insightful view of the Louisa May Alcott novel, one that takes into account what was always present in the novel but brings it into the light of the 21st century: the changes in the roles and attitudes of women. By rearranging the chronology of the novel and structuring it around the development of Jo March (Ronan) as a writer, Gerwig has accomplished two things: She has allowed the other March sisters to share the spotlight that Jo hogged when she was played by Hepburn and Ryder. She has also revealed the rather sentimental endings of the other films as what they were: contrivances designed to please moviegoers, as they did readers, more than to reflect actual life. By establishing in the film that Jo is accommodating the desire of her publisher (Tracy Letts) that the heroine of her Little Women not remain a spinster, Gerwig is able to go a little bit over the top in the film, bringing back Prof. Bhaer (Louis Garrel), with whom Jo broke off over his criticisms of her writing, for a giddy reunion and wedding to Jo. This is all staged with the kind of unabashed sentimentality, including a glimpse of Jo's very improbable school, in which all the sisters and their husbands are the instructors and the curriculum includes fencing, that can't be taken with a straight face. We are meant to sense that the real Jo March might well have remained a spinster rather than capitulate to, as she puts it in the movie, "people saying that love is just all that women are fit for." It's also an ending that wouldn't have worked if Gerwig and her performers hadn't created characters that have a little more body than the source gives them: Timothée Chalamet's Laurie isn't just the slightly odd young man he is in the book (and in the performances of Douglass Montgomery and Christian Bale in the earlier versions), but rather spoiled, dilettantish, and probably alcoholic. Florence Pugh deserved the Oscar nomination she got for bringing more than just flightiness to the character of Amy. Even Beth (Eliza Scanlen) in this version is more than just the saintly innocent who dies young, and we have Gerwig's script and direction for allowing them to blossom rather than being overwhelmed by Jo, good as Ronan's performance is. I can't quite subscribe to Anthony Lane's comment that her Little Women "may just be the best film yet made by an American woman," which hardly seems fair to the work of directors from Dorothy Arzner to Ida Lupino to Kathryn Bigelow and Kelly Reichardt, but it's certainly a provocative and sometimes audacious triumph. 

Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007)

James McAvoy and Keira Knightley in Atonement

Cast: Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, Benedict Cumberbatch, Vanessa Redgrave, Juno Temple, Brenda Blethyn, Harriet Walter, Jérémie Renier, Alfie Allen, Patrick Kennedy, Daniel Mays, Nonso Anozie, Gina McKee. Screenplay: Christopher Hampton, based on a novel by Ian McEwan. Cinematography: Seamus McGarvey. Production design: Sarah Greenwood. Film editing: Paul Tothill. Music: Dario Marianelli.

Atonement -- and I'm speaking here of Joe Wright's film and not the novel by Ian McEwan on which it's based -- tries to have it both ways: It provides both a happy ending in keeping with the lush, romantic production and a bleak surprise ending perhaps truer to the epic wartime sequence that interrupts the romance. But by doing so it demonstrates that what may work on the page as a provocative fable doesn't entirely work on screen. Both film and book ask a key moral and aesthetic question: Can art provide both truth and justice? Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan as a child, Romola Garai as a young woman, Vanessa Redgrave in old age) seeks redemption for a lie, but in the end she thinks she has achieved it by lying again, by writing a work of autobiographical fiction that is untrue to what actually happened. That moral conundrum comes as a kind of surprise at the very end of Wright's film, but it's anticipated on every page of McEwan's novel, a trick that can only be pulled in literature, where the unreliable narrator is a familiar device. There's a problem, too, in visualizing McEwan's story, where both the opulent country-house setting and the portrayal of the Dunkirk retreat, with its celebrated long traveling shot, tend to overwhelm the narrative and the depiction of the characters of Briony, Cecilia (Keira Knightley), and Robbie (James McAvoy). The actors, fine as they are, keep getting upstaged by the images. It's what it was called at the time, an "Oscar-bait" movie, and it won for Dario Marianelli's score, and picked up nominations for best picture, for Christopher Hampton's screenplay, Ronan's supporting performance, for Seamus McGarvey's cinematography, and for art direction and costumes.

Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017)

Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf in lady Bird

Lady Bird McPherson: Saoirse Ronan
Marion McPherson: Laurie Metcalf
Larry McPherson: Tracy Letts
Danny O'Neill: Lucas Hedges
Kyle Scheible: Timothée Chalamet
Beanie Feldstein: Julie Stefans
Sister Sarah Joan: Lois Smith
Father Leviatch: Stephen Henderson
Jenna Walton: Odeya Rush
Miguel McPherson: Jordan Rodrigues
Shelly Yuhan: Marielle Scott

Director: Greta Gerwig
Screenplay: Greta Gerwig
Cinematography: Sam Levy
Production design: Chris Jones
Film editing: Nick Houy
Music: Jon Brion

Maybe it's not the "female 400 Blows" that Greta Gerwig reportedly wanted to make, but it'll do until that comes along. We could only hope that Gerwig has something like François Truffaut's "Antoine Doinel cycle" in the works. It doesn't have to be the "Lady Bird McPherson" cycle, either, but just more sensitive, intelligent films about family and environment, capturing the essence that she caught of growing up in Sacramento. And I hope that if she does, she'll find more roles for the wonderful Laurie Metcalf, whose nuanced performance as Lady Bird's hard-working, hard-bitten mother, skeptical of anything that smacks of overreaching one's station in life, to my mind easily outshadows the performance that beat it for the supporting actress Oscar. Not that Allison Janney wasn't terrific in I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie), but her role was one-note when compared with the subtleties that the part of Marion McPherson demanded -- and Metcalf supplied. I also found myself thinking about a movie that stars Gerwig but which she didn't write or direct, Rebecca Miller's Maggie's Plan (2015), and realizing how movie formulas can either sustain or cripple a film that tries to reach beyond them. In Maggie's Plan, Miller tries to make a conventional domestic comedy rise above its conventions, to infuse its sometimes over-familiar comic situations with a bit of poignant realism. She fails because she's not willing to let her characters transcend the situations, to surprise us. Lady Bird is equally formulaic: It's essentially a coming-of-age teen comedy, something we've seen before. But Gerwig and her performers flesh out the characters into something more plausibly real than the genre demands.

Brooklyn (John Crowley, 2015)

This story about an Irish girl's coming of age has the strong whiff of traditional movie storytelling about it. And that's what makes it so entirely satisfying: It fulfills the need we often feel to be reassured about the stability of familiar things. But it also serves to support its theme, which is that nostalgia can be a trap, or to put it in a phrase that has become a cliché: You can't go home again. Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan) feels stifled in her small Irish town, overshadowed by her pretty and accomplished sister, Rose (Fiona Glascott), and bullied by her vicious, hypocritical employer, Miss Kelly (Brid Brennan), so she decides to go to America. Helped by her church, she gets a room in a Brooklyn boarding house and a job in a department store, gradually loses her shyness and reserve, and falls in love with a sweet-natured young Italian American, Tony Fiorello (Emory Cohen). But when Rose dies suddenly, Eilis returns to Enniscorthy to see her mother and stays long enough to be courted by a young man, Jim Farrell (Domhnall Gleeson), and to begin to see the town in a very different light. The time approaches when she is scheduled to return to America, and she finds herself torn between not just Tony and Jim, but also the small but familiar comforts of the town and a promising but uncertain future in America. She also has a secret that she hasn't shared with anyone, but which the vicious Miss Kelly learns through the Irish-American grapevine. That this dilemma should play itself out with such freshness is a tribute to John Crowley's direction and Nick Hornby's adaptation of Colm Tóibín's novel, but also in very large part to a brilliant performance by Ronan. It's the kind of understated acting that sometimes gets overlooked among performances that chew the scenery with more fervor, but it earned Ronan a well-deserved Oscar nomination. It has to be said that she is supported by splendid performances by Cohen and Gleeson, with Ronan demonstrating a different kind of rapport with each actor. A quiet triumph, but a triumph nevertheless.