The movie doesn’t go the usual route of supplying broad, obvious “establishing” scenes for each of the girls; instead, we gradually get to know them, we sense their personalities, and we see how they relate to one another. The most forcible personality in the family is the tomboy daughter Jo, played in a strong and sunny performance by Winona Ryder. She wants to be a writer, and stages family theatricals in which everyone—even the long-suffering cat—is expected to play a role.
The others include wise Meg (Trini Alvarado) as the oldest; winsome Amy (Kirsten Dunst) as the youngest, and Beth, poor little Beth (Claire Danes), as the sickly one who survives a medical crisis but is much weakened (“Fetch some vinegar water and rags! We’ll draw the fever down from her head!”). There isn’t a lot of overt action in their lives, but then that’s typical of the nineteenth-century novel about women, which essentially shows them sitting endlessly in parlors, holding deep conversations about their hopes, their beliefs, their dreams, and, mostly, their marriage destinies.
The March girls have many other interests (their mother, played by Susan Sarandon, is what passed 130 years ago for a feminist), but young men and eligible bachelors rank high on the list. Their young neighbor is Laurie (Christian Bale), a playmate who is allowed to join their amateur theatricals as an honorary brother, and who eventually falls in love with Jo. Then there’s Laurie’s tutor, the pleasant Mr. Brooke (Eric Stoltz), who is much taken with Meg, but is dismissed by Jo as “dull as powder.”
Jo, who moves to New York and starts to write lurid Victorian melodramas with titles like
But she is not. And late in the film, when she tells Friedrich that, yes, it’s all right for him to love her, Ryder’s face lights up with a smile so joyful it illuminates the theater.
The buried issues in the story are quite modern: How must a woman negotiate the right path between society’s notions of marriage and household, and her own dreams of doing something really special, all on her own? One day, their mother tells them: “If you feel your value lies only in being merely decorative, I fear that someday you might find yourself believing that’s all you really are. Time erodes all such beauty, but what it cannot diminish is the wonderful workings of your mind.” Quite so.
Love Actually
R, 129 m., 2003
Hugh Grant (Prime Minister), Liam Neeson (Daniel), Colin Firth (Jamie), Laura Linney (Sarah), Emma Thompson (Karen), Alan Rickman (Harry), Keira Knightley (Juliet), Martine McCutcheon (Natalie), Bill Nighy (Billy Mack), Rowan Atkinson (Rufus), Billy Bob Thornton (The U.S. President), Rodrigo Santoro (Karl), Thomas Sangster (Sam), Lucia Moniz (Aurelia). Directed by Richard Curtis and produced by Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, and Duncan Kenworthy. Screenplay by Curtis.
The movie is written and directed by Richard Curtis, the same man who wrote three landmarks in recent romantic comedy: