Nosh 179: 'Little Women', 12 Best Movies of 2019 & More

David Elliott

         

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.

APPETIZER (Review: Little Women)   
                 

Little Women
It opens with a yarn and closes with a book, each written by Louisa May Alcott. The adapter is Greta Gerwig, who directed. Katharine Hepburn (1933) played the high-spirited Jo March most fans remember – fans of June Allyson (1949) and Winona Ryder (1994) have settled into a sullen pout. Gerwig has tossed the top-Kate mantle onto her terrific Lady Bird star, Saoirse Ronan, who again buries her dear Irish accent to play American. Verdict (mine): Hepburn by a pert New England nose, on sheer star power, but it’s darn close and Ronan rules the moment.

“If I were a girl in a book, life would be so much simpler,” young Jo grouches at one point. It’s a good point, for Alcott, a plain gal who had a fretful, workaholic, sexually covert life, simplified herself but also bottled her fierce spirit inside Jo. Ronan uncorks Hepburnian vim as the brainy, endearing busybody, with her own tonic fizz. When she chops off most of her hair, then cries about losing her only beauty feature, it’s silly-sweet because she still looks adorable. The prettiest sister is Meg, who heads fast for maternity and marriage (time to stop thinking of Emma Watson as That Harry Potter Girl, but as her nice, dull catch, James Norton seems fallen from his hunky priest on TV’s Grantchester). 

Quick snaps: Eliza Scanlen is touchingly fated as Beth, the musical sister; full-faced Florence Pugh stands out boldly as sister Amy, art-minded but also deeply sane; Timothée Chalamet, so lean and pretty he looks like the love child of James Dean and a feminine falcon, flits vividly between Amy and Jo; Meryl Streep is rich “old maid” Aunt March, so sparky she is ready to become Dickens’s Miss Haversham at the drop of a wig, and Laura Dern is splendid as the girls’s careworn, deeply loving mother. It is the Civil War era, and sex seems as rare as a Confederate $3 bill. Gerwig sublimates busy teen hormones into fast, overlapping dialog, smooches, funny dancing, lush costumes and superbly 19^th century moodscapes shot by Yorick LeSaux, whose images recall painters like Winslow Homer, George Inness and Eastman Johnson.

“So I thought,” Gerwig has said, “OK, they were people, so we’re allowed to make them people.” No wax dolls here, but some good curls of Victorian posing, dialog true to the book and times, crafty episodes that flow along confidently. Gerwig trips a bit in letting some talk fly off into air, barely heard, and in slippery back-and-forth phases of girlhood and young womanhood. Viewers who haven’t read the novel (even some who have) might get tangled. But the film rallies, surges, wittily handles the issue of Jo’s sudden marriage (Alcott stayed single), and affirms like a joyful piper her zeal to be a free writer. Alcott wrote a lot of minor pulp fiction, but also fashioned a classic novel from her mind and heart. The arrival at movie’s end of Little Women, bound tight and crammed with life, is a wonderful salute to the age of ink – and women ascendant.    

SALAD (A List)

My 12 Best (Favorite) Movies of 2019
A good year! These I reviewed and relished (closing number is the Flix Nosh of that review; just scroll down to find it). 

1. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

An amazingly vital, hip tour of L.A. and the biz, making an epochal turn in 1969. The fairy-tale revisionism at the end is justified by Quentin Tarantino’s most personal work, his most adult art since Jackie Brown. Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio are fab-dude leads, vulnerable machos. Margot Robbie is the jewel of a foolproof support cast. Even for those not movie-nostalgic at Tarantino level, this should be an abundant entertainment. Oscar, attention please! (161)

2. Pain and Glory

In his most mature and self-searching work, Spain’s masterful Pedro Almodóvar made his own 8½ (he was 68½ during filming). As the body-afflicted, memory-haunted director Antonio Banderas crowns his own career with consummate depth, in a wonderful movie. (176)

  

3. Shoplifters

Six desperate people in a little Tokyo flat, held together by food, theft and ramshackle love. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s marvel is like an Italian neo-realist picture given an amazingly adroit Japanese revamp. A little lost girl is the family pet, in this petri dish of the lower strata. (139)

4. Motherless Brooklyn

More than a rummage of classic noir hooks, Edward Norton’s teeming NYC take on Jonathan Lethem’s novel brings back the ruthless, bursting era of builder Robert Moses. Norton is excellent as the bold but afflicted gumshoe who steps on a lot of night worms (it’s a fecund plot). Here is Chinatown plus The Cotton Club plus … well, a plus all-over. (173)

5. The Last Black Man in San Francisco

A smart, rueful valentine to the golden city, its small but vital black population and Jimmie Fails, seeking his roots in a grand Victorian home steeped in family myth. Fails scripted and stars, directed by buddy Joe Talbot. Their poem of urbanity may well be the most haunting San Franscape since Vertigo. (158)

6. Little Women

The review is above. (179)

 

7. Ad Astra

One of the few intimately dramatic, and yet spectacular, sci-fi films. In his high-tide year, Brad Pitt is terrific as a bold veteran astronaut seeking his lost father (Tommy Lee Jones), a bitter, distant Ahab who scorns Earth. James Gray directed this utterly felt vision of risky connections in deep astral (and mental) space. (168)

 

8. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché

Told superbly, Pamela B. Green’s elegant documentary is about French (then American) movie pioneer Guy-Blaché, an almost forgotten master of silent innovation. She made treasure until the new studio system’s patriarchy shut her down. An astonishing window of discovery. (159)

9. The Goldfinch

John (Brooklyn) Crowley’s daring, tricky, stylish treatment of Donna Tartt’s  big novel about an Oliver Twisty boy, his busted family, a painting, Russian hoods and the wild ways of discordant fate. It’s a neo-Dickensian cake, succulent with flavors that are not too literary. (167)

 

10. They Shall Not Grow Old

A very different epic from Peter (Lord of the Rings) Jackson.  He blew the dust off footage from London’s Imperial War Museum, deftly colorized it and brought back alive the warrior bond, courage and horror of those who a century ago went into the grisly trenches for Britain.  (143)

11. The World Before Your Feet

Jeremy Workman follows smart, amiable Matt Green as, on tireless feet, he visits the vistas, nooks, edges and occupants  of big New York City. The best Apple chomp since 1998’s great documentary The Cruise took its own juicy bite. (142)

12. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

A non-mawkish homage to TV educator and kids’s best chum Fred Rogers. Marielle Heller concentrates the lessons of Morgan Neville’s fine 2018 documentary. Tom Hanks plumbs Rogers’s wise, gentle depth as he helps an emotionally damaged  journalist (fine Matthew Rhys). (178)

Also aglow in the alluring dark:

The Aeronauts, All is True, Amazing Grace, Apollo 11, Best of Enemies, The Biggest Little Farm, Booksmart, Buñuel in the Labyrinth of Turtles, By the Grace of God, The Chambermaid, Diane, Dolemite is My Name, Downton Abbey, Ford v Ferrari, The Irishman, The Invisibles, Loro, Meeting Gorbachev, Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, Mustang, Parasite, Photograph, Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins, Stan & Ollie, Them That Follow, Tolkien, Transit, The Two Popes, Welcome to Marwen, Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, Wild Rose, Woman at War.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson is currently tasting the new Paul Masson varieties at a Napa Valley wine cave. He will, if sober, return next week.

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Zero Mostel was usually a loud, wild talent, but he could be subtle: “The blacklist cast its shadow again with Zero’s stunning exit in The Front, 1976. As a blacklisted comic he leaves a room, takes a turn – and vanishes. We see the breeze-blown curtain of a high, fatal window. It was his speechless but resonant tribute to his friend Philip Loeb, blacklisted into suicide.” (From the Mostel/The Producers chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A fine movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

No 2019 film better probed personal life with exciting style than Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria), a consummation apex for director-writer Pedro Almodóvar and star (above) Antonio Banderas (El Deseo/Sony Pictures Classics; director Almodóvar, d.p. José Luis Alcaine).

For previous Flix Noshes, scroll below.