A few members of Team Experience will be sharing posts on their favorite Christmas movies. Here's Lynn Lee
You can have your Christmas Story or your It’s a Wonderful Life. For me, my Christmas movie will always be Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women, which took its bow Christmas Day, 1994, and has kept a place in my heart ever since. Even though it faithfully adapts a literary classic, the movie’s also a perfect encapsulation of the ’90s: besides Winona Ryder, for whom Little Women was something of a pet project, it also featured a very young Kirsten Dunst, fresh off her star-making turn in Interview With a Vampire, and Claire Danes, still in her Angela Chase days, making her big-screen debut, as well as a 20-year-old Christian Bale completing his transition from child to adult actor.
None of that, of course, meant anything to me when I first saw the film...
Little Women was one of my favorite books as a child, which meant I had a child’s protectiveness towards the material. I wasn’t a fan of either the 1933 or 1949 adaptations, and was prepared to hate the new one on the basis of casting alone. In what universe, complained I, was the tiny and preternaturally beautiful Winona Ryder a plausible choice to play the gangly, awkward, and decidedly plain tomboy Jo March?
Turns out, this one. It was love at first sight for me—with the movie and, yes, with Noni’s performance, which made you look past her beauty to the restless cauldron of emotions and energy chafing inside. The Academy apparently felt similarly, rewarding her with an Oscar nomination for best actress (she lost to Jessica Lange for Blue Sky); Colleen Atwood’s costumes and Thomas Newman’s score also got nods. And the film has endured, becoming the definitive adaptation of Little Women for bookish little girls everywhere. It was one of the first movies I requested my parents to get for me on video and insisted on watching every Christmas I spent at their home. It’s not quite as regular annual appointment viewing for me now, but if I do see it, it’s always around this time of year.
I watched it again recently, and in honor of the 12 days of Christmas, here are 12 random thoughts that passed through my head as I watched it:
1. That Thomas Newman score still wraps it arms around me like a warm blanket. The main theme makes me think of roaring fires and sleigh rides and “Americana” in the best sense; other parts evoke delicately drifting snowflakes.
2. Right at the outset, the movie does a good job establishing in quick strokes the sisters’ distinguishing traits: Jo’s writerly fervor and joie de vivre, Meg’s gentle stickling for decorum; Beth’s quiet sweetness; Amy’s exaggerated sense of self-importance.
3. What ever happened to Trini Alvarado?
4. Has Christian Bale ever been as charming as he was as Laurie?
5. The movie treads delicately – and for the most part successfully – between remaining faithful to the spirit of the book and dialing back some of its preachier, more 19th century mores (like punishing poor Meg for wanting to dress sexy and flirt – o, horrors!). Less successful are its efforts to shoehorn in facts from Alcott’s real life and her family’s social philosophy (feminism, abolitionism, Transcendentalism) to make the Marches seem more progressive-minded.
6. Noni is a joy, but the makeup & wardrobing department’s attempts to make her look plain are laughable. (I still remember the theater audience in 1994 hooting at the line “Your one beauty!” when Jo cuts her hair.) It’s not just her, though: Susan Sarandon and Gabriel Byrne are far sexier than Alcott or anyone probably ever envisioned Mrs. March or Professor Bhaer.
7. The second half of the movie shifts its focus entirely to Jo, rather to the detriment of the other sisters (except Beth).
8. Does anyone really like Amy? She’s the hardest to like in the book, too, which at least allowed her character more development and growth. Here, it’s a tribute to Kiki that she’s as appealing as she is as a child; I like Samantha Mathis, but her grown-up Amy seems to have no personality whatsoever.
9. Relatedly, Bale has maybe 1/100 of the chemistry with Mathis that he has with Noni. (In fairness, his “grown-up” Laurie comes across like a failed proto-hipster, and there’s something inherently weird about dating the little sister of the woman who broke your heart.)
10. Maybe the credit belongs to Noni. She has chemistry w/ the much older Byrne, too, even if I can’t help reading a Freudian father-figure dynamic into their romance.
11. Beth’s death scene still slays me every time. “Now I am the one going ahead…” (commence weeping)
12. This is still the best adaptation of Little Women, hands down.
What is *your* special Christmas movie and do you have fond memories of Little Women?